>Phone calls are predominantly direct, 1:1 exchanges
>Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines
The Internet is _not_ a broadcast medium. Data transfer over the Internet is by nature peer-to-peer.
>ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players
Someone _is_ paying for the load for big players: the consumers who are accessing their sites.
>some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day
30 Mb/s residential service already costs more than 5 Mb/s residential service.
>Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Net neutrality is fundamentally a consumer protection preventing ISPs from leveraging their natural monopolies on last-mile service to enact rent-seeking policies. Whether ISPs charge consumers directly for access to, say, competing content providers ("Watch Turner Classic Movies for free with Spectrum Basic 10 Mb/s, or upgrade to Spectrum Premium 10 Mb/s for only $19.99 per month to access Netflix, Hulu, and HBO!"), or they charge those content providers extra to peer their traffic and those content providers fold that into subscription fees, we're the ones getting bent over the barrel.