You are wrong.

Have you heard of the music business? Only in the past 15 years or so has an artist without major label backing been able to break out. Why? Because a nobody could make music and 'publish' it herself without getting the permission or validation of a major label. It's the promise of 'music publishing neutrality' in practice and it only barely works! However, radio-play is the EXACT model that will exist if companies have control over all content delivery.

The location of Verizon servers should be irrelevant on an open internet but it certainly would matter if the only path to them was through a competitor's infrastructure and the competitor didn't have to treat Verizon's traffic just like everyone else's.

Consider that, instead of a Goliath like Verizon that, instead, you wanted to try out that new 'Facebook' thing that people were talking about and your ISP was the only path through to Facebook. If Facebook seemed like a profitable service, your ISP would stand up MySpace and direct you to there instead, putting a premium on Facebook access. Facebook wasn't started by a major corporation, had no funding for advertising, or for securing access to it through your ISP while it grows in popularity. In a non-open internet Facebook will never catch on because it will never have a chance to catch on by word-of-mouth. It only has a chance if it can compete fairly.

AOL et al died because competitive services could arise on an Internet that was unfettered and (the clincher) people were able to access without involving AOL. Of course AOL would have survived if an upstart wouldn't have been accessible by means outside of AOL. How can you possibly offer that AOL wouldn't have kept customers in their walled garden if they could have? It was their entire business model! They would have never opened access to the open internet if there hadn't been competition.

And you're using an emotional logical fallacy by mentioning dead dogs...