"why shouldn't a vendor be allowed to charge more for tiered service?" Vendors should be able to charge whatever they want for aspects of 'Quality of Service'.

"why shouldn't a vendor be allowed to charge more for tiered service?" Vendors should be able to charge whatever they want for aspects of 'Quality of Service'. However, they should not be able to arbitrarily single out customers. If there is a lack of competition then this can create a systematic collusion problem among vendors, i.e. they all know to charge really high for specific scenarios because it's better to do that then get in a price war with competitors. This is why aspects of critical infrastructure in many nations are nationalized or heavily regulated: the 'power lines' in Ontario are managed by the government (single point of access) but power generation is 'privatized' and 'competitive'. (Not really, but it's supposed to be. To really play the devil's advocate, one might argue that there is really no 'net neutrality' in things like social and search because of the incredible incumbency that Google and FB has, and that they are in almost unassailable positions, moreover, they have considerably more power to leverage their de-facto monopolies into other ares. It's Google's strategy to basically commoditize everything around them (browser, maps, email, mobile OS) to protect their core business. I worked for BlackBerry and left just before the deluge - one could make the argument that Google's giveaway of Android is a massive subsidy from one layer of the business to another that ultimately hurt competition by putting many other vendors out of business. It's not unfeasible they may knock out Apple some day. This would be viewed as anti-competitive were it to be done in any other industry really. As a historical note: remember that Standard Oil did not get it's power from making great deals - they bought up railroads and charged competitors a tiny bit more for moving their own, which caused competitors to struggle. Then Standard bought them up one by one. So it was a railroad monopoly (single point of access for transport) that enabled a much bigger monopoly in Oil, a commodity. So yes, we should Net Neutrality for sure, but we should be equally as vigilant in looking at 'monopolies' in other parts of the value chain, specifically those that use that power to creep into other parts of the value chain.