In my mind, Netflix charges money for their service and is not entitled to a free ride. The fact remains that running an ISP is not free, and you can't scale ou

In my mind, Netflix charges money for their service and is not entitled to a free ride. The fact remains that running an ISP is not free, and you can't scale out a network faster than the cash flows (of which, yes, profits are a part) allow. But think about this: Netflix has a 36% gross profit margin, and Comcast's cable/Internet business has an 11% gross profit margin. Netflix's cost structure is lower in large part because Comcast does a lot of the expensive work for them (i.e. last-mile network maintenance and distribution.) When you start looking at the question like this, you're abandoning any technical argument and instead move the conversation into "well, look at all this money moving near my proximity, I should be getting my beak wet." This is a pretty good warning sign someone is/has started framing the conversation on something other than the issues at hand. Fairness in profit margins is a red herring at best. I like the idea of network neutrality, but I have a much much much stronger fundamental belief: nobody is entitled to a business model. That kind of thing shouldn't even be given the slightest bit of consideration when setting policy. Unless the explicit purpose of a policy is to create a business model, as is the case in Intellectual Property. Creation, improvement, destroying, or diminishing of business models is a lever that is rushed to way too quickly in some nonsense idea of "fairness" for people that are too used to cooperate welfare and don't believe in anything but entrenchment of middle of the road "compromises" that just serve as regulatory entrenchment of the status quo.