And Netflix is also paying for that data, albeit out of profits generated by you paying them.

Everyone pays for their connection to the notional Internet. Individual households tend to pay for all-you-can-eat of a nominal speed, which is fractionally provisioned upstream at whatever rate the ISP thinks that they won't get too many complaints about - typically 10:1. Medium and large companies either buy all-you-can-eat at less underprovisioned services, or pay for 95th percentile billing that is calculated monthly.

Really large corporations pay for interconnections to peering locations, and do a mix of paying for transit and swapping traffic with willing peers. Finally, backbone network companies buy or lease fiber, peering points and data centers and try to pay for as little transit as is economically feasible while shipping data around their networks at lower costs.

Everybody pays for what they use. The larger the scale, the lower the price per bit.

"Fast lanes" and "Zero-rate" traffic are purely subsidies and extortion. Rent-seeking.

Cable TV is dying and you’re correct that this is an attempt to secure higher rent for the internet service that is displacing cable

Maybe we should go back to metered internet then? I'd prefer no NN top metered though.

Depends on your plan, in the UK I've only recently shaken off a metered plan. And mobile plans are usually metered at about 1GB per month for something vaguely affordable.