While I strongly agree in net-neutrality principles, there is the case that in these scenarios the data may not have the same costs to provide, and some may be cheap enough that it doesn't make sense to charge from.
In Australia at least general internet transit is orders of magnitude more expensive then a local peering connection. If the content provider is making the content cheaper then the general internet traffic, then it seems quite reasonable for that saving to be passed on to the customer.
While I love the abstraction that you simply pay a fixed rate per bit/byte, it doesn't accurately portray the connectivity situation at least in Australia, where international transit, and even inter-capital city transit can be a sizeable portion of any costs.
I pay rough costs of $2000 per month for a 100 Mbit / 5TB per month service to my rack in a DC, but I can pay $750 per month for a 10gbit service to a peering (IX) Internet Exchange in the same DC. If I was providing an ISP service I think it would be completely reasonable to not charge for traffic over the peering link as the data is nearly 300x cheaper, its quite possible it would be cheaper to simply not track the usage.
It does create a situation where competition is harder, where a content provider may need to deploy many POPs to ensure their content is available under a peering situation, however I don't see this is inherently anti-competitive.
In Australia at least general internet transit is orders of magnitude more expensive then a local peering connection. If the content provider is making the content cheaper then the general internet traffic, then it seems quite reasonable for that saving to be passed on to the customer.
While I love the abstraction that you simply pay a fixed rate per bit/byte, it doesn't accurately portray the connectivity situation at least in Australia, where international transit, and even inter-capital city transit can be a sizeable portion of any costs.
I pay rough costs of $2000 per month for a 100 Mbit / 5TB per month service to my rack in a DC, but I can pay $750 per month for a 10gbit service to a peering (IX) Internet Exchange in the same DC. If I was providing an ISP service I think it would be completely reasonable to not charge for traffic over the peering link as the data is nearly 300x cheaper, its quite possible it would be cheaper to simply not track the usage.
It does create a situation where competition is harder, where a content provider may need to deploy many POPs to ensure their content is available under a peering situation, however I don't see this is inherently anti-competitive.