[Coda]

Here's what you're really missing: It has nothing to do with the price to users.

Here's the way I understand it. I could be wrong.

In a fair scenario, with net neutrality, every backbone carrier will deliver traffic from every other backbone carrier. They won't throttle it, they won't inspect it, they'll just pass it through and send it on to its destination. If you make a service, you pay one company -- an ISP. If you use up too much bandwidth, your ISP charges you accordingly. If your ISP uses up too much bandwidth with the backbone carrier, the backbone will charge the ISP accordingly (and by extension your ISP will pass the buck to you -- this is a good thing, it means the party responsible for the traffic pays for it). If the backbone carriers start having problems with the amount of traffic they have to carry, they adjust their rates accordingly, and again, the price hike bubbles back to the source of the problem.

Without net neutrality, backbone carriers can decide that not all incoming traffic is created equal. They can see where it's coming from and INTENTIONALLY SLOW IT DOWN. And then they contact the source of the traffic directly and say "hey, if you want to go fast again, pay us money." As a result, some customers of the service get different quality of service than others, and the customers CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. They could theoretically switch to a different ISP, but there may not be a choice available. They can't pay their ISP more to get better performance -- sure, you get more bandwidth, but the service you care about is still throttled. And what's more, the customer's ISP may not even be in a position to improve things anyway, because the throttling could be somewhere else on the backbone.

That's why net neutrality is a big deal -- it allows backbone providers to discriminate against services, even if those services ARE CUSTOMERS OF ANOTHER CARRIER.