ISPs could before throttle your access to specific websites.

Say you use Comcast for your home internet, and you wanted to go to Reddit. Well Comcast could sit there and say, "Sorry you're paying $100 a month to access these websites, if you want to access Reddit that'll be another $10 a month."

Sort of like with your cable plans, you pay for certain tv stations, and certain stations have their own charges.

But there's another aspect. Let's say you do pay the extra $10 a month to access Reddit, Comcast could then turn around to Reddit and tell them that unless Reddit pays Comcast $100 a month, they will slow everyone down trying to access Reddit.

How long will you continue using Reddit if it takes 10 minutes to load a single webpage? So now Reddit is forced to pay Comcast.

Now many here and saying "Well just switch to another ISP, free market and all".

But internet service isn't a free market. Certain ISPs have monopolies on entire towns/counties, making it so they are the only providers. So you get people saying "Well just move if you don't like it".

Well that's kind of a shitty position to be in right? Having to uproot your life just because internet providers are being dicks.

Then it moves on to "Well new ISPs will take their place then". Well that's not going to happen for decades, Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world has been trying to roll out their internet service but it literally cost billions. Then even if they can afford to roll it out, again, many towns/counties have passed laws/regulations which makes it so only 1 or 2 ISPs can operate, giving them a monopoly which allows them to do whatever they want.