I'm a decade long PhD in EE, and currently work as a senior research scientist developing autonomy for advanced robotic systems. And yeah, I totally get that it's sometimes hard to separate people who know what their talking about from people who don't. Especially since people who know what they're talking about on some things don't know what they're talking about on others. The Windows/Linux/OSX divide is like that. Very few people have exposure to multiple OS's on a daily basis. So please forgive any over simplistic explanations. (It's a tough balance that I seldom get right)
To continue the discussion, I'd also point out that it's pretty easy to see things from the ISP's point of view. The ISP wants to sell you as much theoretical bandwidth as possible, while at the same time discouraging you from using it. Obviously they sell far more bandwidth than they can actually provide...(which is fine, because unused capacity is wasteful) They also want to encourage you to use their partners web services instead of their competitors. So to them, any high bandwidth data uses mean less profit for them.
But understand that the way the cable companies act is a complete antithesis to the GPL/LGPL/BSD/etc underpinnings of the internet. It's very much a cooperative model: take what's there, use it to innovate, profit from that innovation, and then contribute to what's out there. If that work helps your competitor, so be it.. If you want to beat them, then have a better product. Besides, keeping the talent in house is much more of an advantage.
A good bulk of the Web Servers in the world owe their existence to these guys
Apache Contributors - The Apache HTTP Server Project. Remember the shellshock bug? Well look at the commit logs for bash:
bash.git - bash It's one guy... doing all of the support for bash. Compilers that turn lines of text into executables? They're all written, maintained, and improved by unpaid volunteers. Linux, Python, Perl, PHP, phpBB (ie the backend of this site), MySQL... basically the bulk of the internet runs software that no one paid for.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.. all understand the importance of open source development. They understand that they profit greatly from the work of others and thus understand the importance of paying back.
What do ISPs do? They're running software that other people wrote, using hardware that other people developed, to essentially extort money from the same people that developed the software in the first place. Yes we need them. Yes taking care of lines and connections and distributing broadband is vital to the success of the internet. But so is everything else. The idea that they should profit because they have access to a bottleneck is ridiculous. Almost all of the internet is a bottleneck. What if Chet Ramey were to implement something in ssh that exposes ISPs to malicious software attacks unless they all pay him some exorbitant fee? What if phpBB decides that it will no longer properly function to a comcast IP address? What if microsoft was to intentionally slow down java applets from sites that don't pay them money?
Do you see where this is heading?