> Electricity companies can’t (reliably) tell what you’re using the power for so in a sense they do act as dumb pipes (except they do care if you use it for commercial vs residential),

No, actually, they don't. That is what the plans are labeled as, but they really don't care about whether you are commercial or residential, that is the point that I was trying to make. What they care about is your load profile. Residential vs. commercial users on average have a very distinct load profiles (throughout the day and throughout the week), and that leads to different costs, which is why they want to bill you according to your load profile. Ultimately, if you happen to run a business that has the load profile of a typical residential user, they would often rather want to have you as a residential customer because that matches their costs. It's just that billing using load-dependent prices throughout the day has traditionally not been technically feasible, which is why the simplified distinction of residential vs. commercial plans was developed, because that matches reality well enough in most cases.

> People argue zero rating means base prices must be encompassing the cost of the “free” service, but it’s coming with strings attached like reduced bandwidth or as a way to attract new users.

How is that a contradiction? Yes, it comes with reduced bandwidth ... which still is being paid for with the income from the base prices, isn't it? And yes, it is being used as a way to attract new users ... while also hurting the existing customers, the new users, and their competition!? I really don't see how this in any way reduces the negative impact of it all, and thus why you even bring it up?!

> While I do feel certain companies might be able to use zero-rating to reinforce monopolies, I don’t feel zero-rating inherently creates an environment where companies can’t compete.

Well, what do you mean by "can't compete"? Do you mean "are unavoidably destined for failure", or "have an increased risk of failure"?

The former probably isn't the case, but also is not a useful standard. Almost nothing that is generally agreed to be bad directly guarantees total failure. Does putting carcinogens into food mean that everyone will die of cancer? No, it doesn't. Do we still consider putting carcinogens into food a bad thing? Yes, we do. Why? Because it increases the risk of dying of cancer.

Now, if you do agree that increased risk of failure is a good enough reason to consider something bad ... isn't it obvious that having higher costs than your competition increases the risk of failure for a business?

> (the one real one has a subtle, but important difference, access isn’t blocked if you don’t choose one of those packages, you just pay the normal base rate)

What practical difference does it make whether access is blocked or prohibitively expensive?

Suppose we introduced a new law that requires you to pay a million bucks, not refundable, in order to leave the country (for travel or otherwise), except if you purchased the travel package for 100 bucks that allows unlimited travel to Australia? Would you also say that it's a subtle but important difference that traveling abroad was not forbidden and relations to other countries would not suffer, you would just have to pay the base rate?

> After all, zero rating on Netflix doesn’t help a unicorn become the next Netflix, and there are plenty of people here who feel like all of this goes against the very spirit of the internet.

I guess there are. But isn't that much more importantly against the spirit of a competetive market economy, and thus in particular against the interests of the customers?

> But it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion when everything you say is immediately downvoted to ghost status. I mean I made that were barely more than a single fact got downvoted until they couldn’t easily be read anymore, and people are still mass downvoting my statements hours later.

Really, looking through which of your comments got downvoted, my impression is that's mostly for glaringly obvious errors in logic, primarily a failure to consider solutions to problems that are possible without a violation of network neutrality. The mere fact that there is a problem and an ISP that is not bound by network neutrality can solve that problem by violating network neutrality just doesn't say anything about whether net neutrality is a good idea, if you don't ever consider how the same problem might be solved with network neutrality.