Double paid traffic

The internet is much more than just HTTP traffic - the purpose isn't to provide access to content so the fact that these are content providers (i.e. data is requested) doesn't matter. I can host my backups via a web server at home and wget them from my remote server, the fact I "requested" that from the remote server means nothing.

The ISPs customers are paying for a connection to the ISPs network, nothing more. Every connection to the network is a node - in a network neutral world the fact they are a content provider is meaningless. If they need to push more data, they need to pay.

I really don't see the difference between this, and a large company attempting to send their backups via the web. We could easily set it up so the remote servers are "requesting" that data -- but it's not the cable subscriber's job to subsidize my network infrastructure so we lease a line to ensure the speed we need. We have over 100mbps connection on both sides, but that is only a 100mbps connection to the ISP. If we need to move data at that speed all the way from point A to B, then we need to pay for the infrastructure to do that.

What is the internet protocol by which you push data from one node to another without the other node's consent? Every one I can think of would generally be called a DoS attack.

There's no such thing as "push" data, it's like trying to push a rope. Any reasonably sized data stream has the consent of both parties on the network.

Then the correct solution is to use those peering agreements in between ISP:s to get that money to expand the infrastructure as necessary, and if the ISP:s with customers creating the traffic can't pay then they can chose between stopping the traffic or charging their own clients more.

In no circumstance should an ISP be directly charging the customer of another ISP.

I agree but that's not what's happening here. They are just directly passing on the cost to provide service - the customers are paying Hetzner not the ISP (unless I'm reading wrong - but I did double check).

In this situation, Core-Backbone pays for peering with DTAG and Hetzner pays them to transport their data. I'm not seeing how that is an ISP billing another ISPs customer? Hetzner is paying Core-Backbone, Core-Backbone is paying DTAG. Same as Netflix paying Cogent to transport their data.

This is not about the size of some content provider, but about not providing the service they bill their customers for. The DSL subscriber pays for an internet connection at n Mbit/s. Note: The DSL subscriber does not pay for a line to their local central office, the product telcos sell to end customers is internet access. Now, these customers who have bought internet access request some data transfer from some server at Hetzner (for example), and Hetzner essentially says "here, we have a few gigabytes of data for your customer, where should we drop them off so you can deliver them?" - and the telco's answer is "we won't, unless you pay us!"

This is not about moving the data to the telco's network, but about the telco delivering the packets to their customers. Cost-neutral peering does not mean free peering, those "content providers" complaining about net neutrality violations do not complain because they have to pay for a line from their datacenter to some location where the DSL telco's network is, so that they can interconnect (they generally are more than willing to pay for that, at least if it's not some location where the respective telco is the only one who could provide the line and would bill unusually high rates for it) - what they are complaining about is that, essentially, even if they were to offer delivering their traffic directly to all the central offices of the telco using their own lines, so the telco only would have to connect them to the DSLs of their customer, those telcos would refuse unless they were paid for it.

And I am not exaggerating: There have been cases where CDNs offered to place cache servers in the telco's network, to pay for the rack space and the power and their servers at normal hosting rates that other hosting customers would pay, so that the traffic originates as close to the subscriber as possible, thus reducing the network costs for wide-area transport by the telco as much as possible, and they refused.

They want to be paid for access to their customers - nobody would complain if they wanted to bill for wide-area transit at normal market rates, or even if they wanted to have the traffic delivered closer to their subscribers, as long as the content provider could choose their transit provider freely, thus buying the transit at market rates. But in practice, they want to be paid unless you installed your own DSL to their customer.

Also very interesting, though german only, unfortunately: http://netzneutral.init7.net/de/situation-init7.php - they report that they tried to get an offer from DTAG for direct peering, and what they got not only didn't match what they requested, but also had progressive pricing: The more capacity they would have wanted to buy, the more they would have had to pay per unit. That is to say: a 10 Gbit interconnect would have been more than 10 times as expensive as a 1 Gbit interconnect. That certainly is not due to costs, hardware for bigger pipes never gets more expensive the more you buy.