When an airline charges you extra to check bags, they are charging you for a service they provide. This is annoying, but we as a society agree that people gener

When an airline charges you extra to check bags, they are charging you for a service they provide. This is annoying, but we as a society agree that people generally have the right to do this and it is in society's interest that they have that right. When an ISP charges a service provider to get access to their customers, they are leveraging their monopoly on those customers to extract rents from other service providers. What is the social value of this behavior? The main problem with this line of argument is that is can be applied to anything an ISP does, because there is of course no functioning market for last-mile connectivity in most areas. A real fix would be unbundling or something else that split allowed there to be a functioning market over shared infrastructure. That doesn't mean we can't stop them from rent-seeking from other firms in the "short" term. Doing so is in line with Republicans' claimed pro-business stance.