No worries. It's the internet. I was hardly snark free, either.

So, I have a couple priors.

One of these priors is that it is, in general, a good thing to place as few restrictions on actors in society as possible. Not anarchy. Not mindlessly. Just as a general rule of thumb. Something that doesn't need justification on its own, but rather needs a case to be made to go against.

Another of these is that, in general, laws and regulations have costs. Enforcement carries cost. Also, we forego the things that are regulated against - rarely are these things pure evil. Sure, there are exceptions. Genocide is pure evil (though there is much room for compassion for those coerced into participating). This gets us down a rabbit hole quickly.

So, in general entities should be able to make deals. And adding to legislation that exists is costly (as in "bears cost").

The situation you describe sounds a lot like a monopoly. The nightmare scenario presented in net neutrality is typically "Netflix is blocked because Google paid more to let Youtube through". I think this is categorically different than "Netflix is now more expensive than Youtube is". Especially because the latter sentence is already true. We can disagree here.

The case is one of actual blocking. E.g. Google makes some exclusive deal with Comcast, where Comcast does not allow traffic from other streaming video suppliers. This is clearly anticompetitive, and we already have regulation to address it. Comcast and Google would both be blatantly in violation of anti-trust regulations and could be prosecuted. We don't need net neutrality to prevent this. Indeed, there are cases of wholesale blocking of this sort in the past that were dealt with by the FCC without formal net neutrality legislation in place. E.g. Vonage got blocked by an ISP that offered landlines; ISP got smacked.

So as I see it, we're left with the case of differential pricing.

So it seems to me that net neutrality addresses two primary concerns: true anticompetitive behavior and differential pricing.

In the case where services are priced differentially, but all are available, I honestly see very little difference to cable TV. And there seems no inherent reason that all traffic should carry the same price, as it is not the case that all traffic costs the same to an ISP.

So what might cause differential pricing? Sure, Google could pay Comcast to discount its services, but that's just a transfer. If Google pays Comcast to make it easier to get to us, well we're making that up to Google somehow. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Either we're paying with data and ad impressions, or it's baked into the subscription price.

If Google enters a contract with Comcast which has Comcast charge extra for Netflix traffic for no other reason than Netflix competes with Youtube, then we're back in an anticompetitive scenario and don't need net neutrality.

But it is reasonable that different traffic costs differently. If Comcast is offering its own streaming service, they can serve that entirely on their own network - no need to use any peering agreements or pay for bandwidth beyond their own infrastructure. If Youtube or Netflix comes from outside of Comcast's network (not always the case - Netflix subsidizes its traffic by offering streaming appliances to ISPs), then that traffic IS more expensive than Comcast's own content. This seems entirely reasonable to price differentially.

Ultimately, I would like net neutrality, and would personally benefit from it. Or rather, I would personally have my current state prevented from being negatively impacted, since net neutrality is largely the status quo. I do not fail to see this. But it is an argument that doesn't hold water with me (I am not saying this is your argument, simply that it is a common one).

So, I think we may be at a bit of an ideological impasse. If I interpret your response correctly, one of your priors is roughly "if we see an area where we think we can improve things through legislation/regulation, we should". My priors lead me to look askance at new regulation/legislation. I don't see why we need net neutrality, only why we might want it. For me, "need" is the threshold for legislation, not "want".

Let me know if I'm off on what I suggested as the two primary issues addressed, or if you have questions on where I'm coming from, or if I seem to be off on interpreting your stance.