The whole net neutrality argument was made by people who've never operated a large scale network. I've shifted Tbps for a big content provider for some years now and I also worked for two ISPs.
The idea of paying for premium access and it negatively affecting the competition is looking at the challenge wrong. It also presumes that ISPs have one fat pipe that gets divided up, which is not usually the case unless you're a tiny ISP.
What actually affects performance and is probably the case with this user is that ISPs and CDNs need to come to an agreement over what connectivity they peer with. At scale they don't do that over public peering, it's private peering either through a third party (like Equinix or Digital Realty) or directly patching fibres within the major data centres and linking their networks together. New and unusual services will likely use public peering instead of private peering, or they won't use an tier 1 CDN like Akamai who an ISP would peer with, instead using someone like Bunny CDN, a fine CDN but not peering on the same scale.
The fairness risk comes not from the CDN or content provider 'paying' for priority, but comes from the ISP not investing in public peering. That's not the content providers fault, it's just bad operational practice. You could say it's the content providers fault for subsidising the route that gets their traffic through, but its really the ISPs poor infrastructure investments playing out. There's a small risk from content providers doing deals with ISPs to "zero rate" traffic where that ISP (or more usually cellular provider) charges users for bandwidth (or caps it), where the big content provider can use their leverage to make their service cheaper to the consumer. But the reality is that zero rating isn't particularly commercially popular, I've seen it once or twice in my career.
The idea of paying for premium access and it negatively affecting the competition is looking at the challenge wrong. It also presumes that ISPs have one fat pipe that gets divided up, which is not usually the case unless you're a tiny ISP.
What actually affects performance and is probably the case with this user is that ISPs and CDNs need to come to an agreement over what connectivity they peer with. At scale they don't do that over public peering, it's private peering either through a third party (like Equinix or Digital Realty) or directly patching fibres within the major data centres and linking their networks together. New and unusual services will likely use public peering instead of private peering, or they won't use an tier 1 CDN like Akamai who an ISP would peer with, instead using someone like Bunny CDN, a fine CDN but not peering on the same scale.
The fairness risk comes not from the CDN or content provider 'paying' for priority, but comes from the ISP not investing in public peering. That's not the content providers fault, it's just bad operational practice. You could say it's the content providers fault for subsidising the route that gets their traffic through, but its really the ISPs poor infrastructure investments playing out. There's a small risk from content providers doing deals with ISPs to "zero rate" traffic where that ISP (or more usually cellular provider) charges users for bandwidth (or caps it), where the big content provider can use their leverage to make their service cheaper to the consumer. But the reality is that zero rating isn't particularly commercially popular, I've seen it once or twice in my career.