I know ISPs attract little sympathy and HN readers naturally do sympathize with startups and smaller organizations (as do I), but consider:
In open markets a seller charges what the market will bear in order to maximize profit. And of course it benefits society because resources are allocated efficiently, i.e. to those with the greatest demand for them (those willing to pay the most). Why should this market be any different? I'd expect that any business, discovering they had an asset someone would pay for, would charge as much as they could for it. There is nothing dirty or underhanded about it, even if it challenges the status quo we all are accustomed to (or the notion that everything on the Internet is free). And it's not like big ISPs are stomping widows and orphan children -- Netflix, for all its victimhood, can stand up for itself and I'm sure maximizes its profit wherever possible. (It may be different for startups.)
I don't want to be absolutist about it, but what I said is a factor. Other factors are that the ISPs benefit from public goods such as local monopolies, and benefit from all the innovation that created the Internet and the services that their customers are paying them for, so they do owe something to maintaining that ecosystem.
And the clear solution, as has been said before here, is customers paying for metered bandwidth, and also for latency or other SLAs if they want them (which long has been common for businesses ISPs) -- why should someone who mostly uses email want to pay for the same latency that a Netflix customer or gamer needs?
Not only do they benefit from public goods, but it's a market where the barrier to entry is so high that competition cannot happen efficiently. Now before our american libertarian friends come frothing at the mouth, the barriers to entry are absurdly high before any sort of government interference, especially in North America, and with a captive customer base, it's just inherently a bad market to showcase capitalism.
So with inefficiencies due to a lack of competition comparable to a government agency AND a profit motive rather than the public service motive that government agencies have, you've got the worst of both worlds. Companies that barely compete to offer good service with the explicit intention of sucking as much of your dollars as they can for a service you can't really go without.
In open markets a seller charges what the market will bear in order to maximize profit. And of course it benefits society because resources are allocated efficiently, i.e. to those with the greatest demand for them (those willing to pay the most). Why should this market be any different? I'd expect that any business, discovering they had an asset someone would pay for, would charge as much as they could for it. There is nothing dirty or underhanded about it, even if it challenges the status quo we all are accustomed to (or the notion that everything on the Internet is free). And it's not like big ISPs are stomping widows and orphan children -- Netflix, for all its victimhood, can stand up for itself and I'm sure maximizes its profit wherever possible. (It may be different for startups.)
I don't want to be absolutist about it, but what I said is a factor. Other factors are that the ISPs benefit from public goods such as local monopolies, and benefit from all the innovation that created the Internet and the services that their customers are paying them for, so they do owe something to maintaining that ecosystem.
And the clear solution, as has been said before here, is customers paying for metered bandwidth, and also for latency or other SLAs if they want them (which long has been common for businesses ISPs) -- why should someone who mostly uses email want to pay for the same latency that a Netflix customer or gamer needs?