Fast lane is a made up political gobbledygook. I think it's fine for an ISP to sell whatever kind of preferential treatment they like to any company which freely chooses to purchase it, with the caveat that they service I'm paying for isn't being degraded.
If Microsoft wants to pay so that streaming stuff to my Xbox doesn't affect my data cap, that's goovy.
If Netflix wants to pay to guarantee they can stream 10Mbps to my devices while my other devices are using the whole 100Mbps that I'm paying for, that's cool too.
If Hulu wants to pay for QoS that prioritizes their traffic to me above my other traffic, that's not cool. Bandwidth management within my home is my domain and I've got my own QoS rules, thank you very much.
When Comcast lets their peering links get saturated in order to force Netflix to pay them, that's absolutely bad. I'm paying for access to the Internet and purposefully withholding the necessary peering to the content I'm interested in means that I'm being ripped off.
TLDR; I believe that ISPs should peer on a settlement-free basis with anyone who can deliver a commercially reasonable level of traffic to any of their peering points, without regard to ratios. And I believe they should be able to sell any kind of paid prioritization they like that does not degrade my other traffic.
I'm not as worried about paying for cap subsidies, which is basically what your 1 and 2 is about.
Keep in mind that still damages the free market for new services, though, because now they don't just have a technological barrier to entry, they have a purely financial/administrative one. I prefer the T-Mobile (music) model where they allow a whole class of services priority, but not on a corp-by-corp basis.
Your Hulu/#3 example is what I'm pretty sure Wheeler's alternative (call it fast lane or whatever) amounted to, before it was shouted down. We both agree that's a pretty horrible thing.
Because if Rdio and Spotify don't count against my data cap because of a paid agreement, a new entrant into music is probably not going to get much of my attention.
They'd have to be -so- much better than the existing leaders that I'm willing to pay for a higher cap or sacrifice part of my current cap to use them.
That effectively means that to be taken seriously, a new entrant has to pay the ISPs for exemption from the cap. Further, if the ISPs can choose not to make agreements with companies, they become the gatekeepers of who will be successful. Piss them off, and you lose your agreement.
This is anticompetitive, for sure, but the FTC has no jurisdiction over common carriers. AT&T is currently flogging this argument based on cc status on phone to escape reprisal from the FTC about lying about "unlimited" plan vs. their throttling policy that effectively caps such a plan to 5 GB. The say that because they're a phone CC, the FTC has to be hands-off period on all their business concerns.
I suspect that'll be found to be BS. However, if broadband is Title II, but we add an exemption to allow anti-competitive agreements around caps, there's literally zero remedy. It's specifically not under jurisdiction of the FTC unless Congress changes that particular law.
So, not a huge worry of mine as long as it's a "exempt all music, anyone can apply," but big worry if it's "exempt Spotify only." There are plenty of streaming markets that aren't sufficiently mature to be commodities yet (PPV on-demand movies like VUDU, iTunes, CinemaNow, Flixter; remote gaming like OnLive, Sony; etc.) and even the ones that are shouldn't be immune from shakeups.
If Microsoft wants to pay so that streaming stuff to my Xbox doesn't affect my data cap, that's goovy.
If Netflix wants to pay to guarantee they can stream 10Mbps to my devices while my other devices are using the whole 100Mbps that I'm paying for, that's cool too.
If Hulu wants to pay for QoS that prioritizes their traffic to me above my other traffic, that's not cool. Bandwidth management within my home is my domain and I've got my own QoS rules, thank you very much.
When Comcast lets their peering links get saturated in order to force Netflix to pay them, that's absolutely bad. I'm paying for access to the Internet and purposefully withholding the necessary peering to the content I'm interested in means that I'm being ripped off.
TLDR; I believe that ISPs should peer on a settlement-free basis with anyone who can deliver a commercially reasonable level of traffic to any of their peering points, without regard to ratios. And I believe they should be able to sell any kind of paid prioritization they like that does not degrade my other traffic.