Okay, from all the public discussion so far, NYT, WaPo, various fora, etc., I totally fail to 'get it'. Maybe I
know too much or too little; likely a mixture of both.

Help! More details anyone?

To be more clear, let's consider: I pay my ISP, a cable TV company, so much a month for Internet service with
speeds -- Mbps, million bits per second -- as stated in the service, maybe 25 Mbps upload
(from me to the Internet) speed and 101 Mbps
download speed.

Now those speeds are just between my computer and
my ISP. So, if I watch a video clip from
some server in Romania, maybe I only get 2 Mbps
for that video clip because that is all my
ISP is getting from the server in Romania.

And I am paying nothing per
bit moved. So, if I watch 10 movies a day
at 4 billion bytes per movie, even then I don't pay more.

Now, to get the bits they send me, my ISP gets those
from some connection(s) to the 'Internet backbone'
or some 'points of presence' (PoP) or some such at
various backbone 'tiers', 'peering centers', etc.

Now, long common in such digital communications have
been 'quality of service' (QoS) and 'class of service'
(CoS). QoS can have to do with latency (how long have
to wait until the first packet arrives?),
'jitter' (the time between packets varies significantly?),
dropped packets (TCP notices and requests retransmission),
out of order packets (to be straightened out by
the TCP logic or just
handled by TCP requesting retransmission), etc. Heck, maybe
with low QoS some packets come with coffee stains from
a pass by the NSA or some such! And CoS might mean,
if a router gets too busy (the way the Internet is designed,
that can happen), then some packets from a lower 'class' of service can be dropped.

But my not very good understanding is that
QoS and CoS, etc., don't much apply between
my computer and my ISP and, really, apply mostly
just to various parts of the 'Internet backbone'
where the really big data rates are. And there
my understanding is that QoS and CoS are
essentially fixed and not adjusted just for
me or Netflix, etc. E.g., once
one of the packets headed for me gets on
a wavelength on a long haul optical fiber,
that packet will move just like many millions
of others, that is, with full 'network neutrality'.

So, I ask for some packets from a server at
Netflix, Google, Facebook, Yahoo,
Vimeo, WaPo, NYT, HN, Microsoft's MSDN, etc. Then that server
connects to essentially an ISP but with likely
a connection to the Internet at 1, 10, 40, 100
Gbps (billion bits per second). And, really,
my packets may come from Amazon Web Services (AWS),
CloudFlare, Akamai, some colocation facility
by Level3 or some such; e.g., the ads may come
from some ad server quite far from where
the data I personally was interested in came from.

Note: I'm building a Web site, and my local
colocation facility says that they can
provide me with dual Ethernet connections
to the Internet at 10 Gbps per connection.

Note: Apparently roughly at present it is common
commercial practice to have one cable with
maybe 144 optical fibers each with
a few dozen wavelengths of laser light
(dense wavelength division multiplexing -- DWDM)
with data rate of 40 or 100 Gbps per wavelength.

So, there is me, a little guy, getting the packets
for, say, a Web page. Various servers send the
packets, they rattle around in various
tiers of the Internet backbone, treated in the
backbone like any other packets,
arrive at my ISP,
and are sent to me over coax
to my neighborhood and to me.

So, with this setup, just where could,
say, Netflix be asked to pay more and for what?
That is, Netflix is already paying their ISP.
That ISP dumps the Netflix packets on the
Internet backbone, and
millions of consumer ISPs get the
packets.
My ISP is just a local guy;
tough to believe that
Netflix will pay them.
Besides, there is no need for Netflix
to pay my ISP since
my ISP is already doing what they
say, that is, as I can confirm
with Web site

http://www.speedtest.net

I'm getting the speeds I paid my
ISP for.

Netflix is going to pay
more to whom for what?

Now, maybe the issue is: If
the Netflix ISP and my ISP
are the same huge company, UGE,
that, maybe, also provides
on-line movies, then UGE can
ask Netflix to pay more or
one or the other of the UGE ISPs
will throttle the Netflix data.
Dirty business.

But Netflix is
a big boy and could get a
different ISP at their end.
Then the UGE ISP who serves
a consumer could find that
the UGE ISP still throttles
data from Netflix but not
from the UGE movie service?
Then the consumer's ISP
would be failing to provide
the data rate the consumer
paid for.

Or, maybe,
the UGE ISP that serves
me might send the
movies from the UGE movie
service not part of the, say, 101 download
speed from my ISP to me and, instead,
provide me with, say, 141 Mbps
while the UGE movie is playing.
This situation would be 'tying', right?
Then if Netflix wants to be part of
this 141 Mbps to a user who paid
for only 101 Mbps, then Netflix
has to pay their UGE ISP more;
this can work for UGE because
they have two ISPs and 'own both
ends of the wire'.

I can easily accept that a big company
with interests at several parts of the
Internet and of media more generally
may use parts of their business
to hurt competition.
Such should be stopped.

But so far the public discussions
seem to describe non-problems.