Just to speculate:

- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.

- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads

To overly simplify it I believe we witnessed a battle of big tech vs big ISP. Each had a financial stake. Big ISP didn't want to pay for investments in infrastructure it didn't think would bring a good ROI or the extra costs you mentioned above with having to comply with new government regulations. And Big tech didn't want to pay extra fees for being some of the biggest servers of data on the internet. The fact so many comments here don't acknowledge big tech also had business interests in net neutrality passing like big ISP had business interests in it failing scares me. They are both big business looking out for their own backsides. I'm saying this as someone who grew up in a house that STILL doesn't have access to highspeed landline internet in 2023 because the ISPs did t consider the density of houses in the area worth the investment. I'm not immune to Big ISP or a shill. But this legislation was not the good vs evil it's made out to be by so many. Big tech companies have little problem taking a stand for some opinions they don't seem acceptable. they don't give neutrality to their platforms either.

Big tech has large service costs because a large number of little people are requesting data from their networks. Data for which the transit has already been payed for by the requestor. Despite the 'asymmetries' in throughput vectors, the market value equivalent of a Poynting vector is minimized with settlement-free peering. Paid peering is only enforceable because there are few enough retail providers for large segments of the population that they can wield monopsony power without customers fleeing on masse from degraded service.

The issue isn't the internet backbones though. The issue is the "last mile" of delivery. The throttling that occurs between the end user and ISP usually occurs at this point and this is where there is the least amount of ROI for telecom operators. The biggest profiteers of unlimited bandwidth are big tech platforms. The biggest investors in getting that bandwidth to end users are ISPs. This is a big business battle of each of them wanting to retain as much profit as possible while making it the other person's problem to pay for it. Google tried running their own ISP and you know what they cited as the biggest hurdle to not doing so on a larger scale? Government regulations. All the permits required were eating tons of time and money. The argument that bigger government regulations are going to save us from big ISP isn't complete.

It was obvious from the one sided marketing that the entire story wasn't being told.

They want to charge you for access, but they also want to charge who you are connecting to, even if through a middleman.

Just because Netflix paid their providers, your local isp wants their cut as well.