Reply #7: Not an entirely accurate description...

[Solon]

Google, Yahoo, other websites do not want to get charged TWICE for the bandwidth used. They already pay thousands of dollars a month for bandwidth, the thing is the ISPs and network carriers, who we also pay, usually at lower prices than Google, want to get paid for connecting you to Google, so they want to charge in one of several ways, by hits, page view, or some other scheme to get even more money out of Google or you, the customer. One idea is for them to give you a "basic" service on the Internet, not a limit on bandwidth, but a limit on access, you have to pay extra to go to Google, or Yahoo, etc. Right now that doesn't exist, you pay for the pipeline, and the ISPs have agreements between each other to share that bandwidth, and anyone can access any website on that are hooked up to that pipeline.

Get rid of net neutrality, and there goes the de facto "common carrier" access, and messages will soon pop up saying "sorry, to get to Google, you need to sign up for Premium Service". Not to mention that some of them will probably start censoring things based on their own criteria, for some reason the website www.sbcsucks.com(not a real website, just an example) doesn't exist for SBC customers.