This is in fact the "original" case of net neutrality. Recently, the discussion was mostly about your ISP charging - either you or some site - to prioritize certain content, like streaming.
But in this context, it is about the providers of the "backbone" of the internet providing the same service to everybody. Usually, different companies and organisations had their public nets, and they allowed each others data to flow through their nets. They made so called "peering" agreements which are a bit intransparent, ISPs have to pay certain amounts depending on the traffic they cause. Then there are private connections that institutions use for themselves.
This is Google renting out their "private" net. What is different is that before, not many organisations had so massive private nets, and while you could buy traffic on them, this was something typically large organisations and companies negotiated (I know certain research institutes pay to have their data routed over a "direct cable" instead of over the regular network). Now, everybody can do so, and choose to pay for the faster route.
What they could have done instead would have been to sign peering agreements and add their connections to the "public" net.
Now, is this illegal or immoral? Well, they certainly have the right to rent out their private net. People have been doing that before. But I think net neutrality is not a binary question, but a continuum. If being able to afford a faster route means your site is faster, that violates net neutrality IMO.
Suppose you are an ISP with a new streaming video service as a customer -- ComFlix. You sell a 1Gb/s pipe to ComFlix. You buy a 10Gb/s pipe from Google.
If Google limits, deprioritizes or drops traffic from ComFlix, that's Google committing a NN violation.
If you limit ComFlix's 1 Gb/s pipe to 1 Gb/s, that's not a NN problem.
If Google limits your 10Gb/s pipe to 10Gb/s, that's not a NN problem.
If Google offers to replace your 10Gb/s pipe with a 20Gb/s pipe at the same price on the condition that video streams will be intercepted and limited so that they cannot support more than 480P, and you accept, both you and Google are violating NN.
If you ask Google for a 10Gb/s pipe but they refuse to sell it to you solely because ComFlix is a competitor for YouTube, you have an interesting court case.
Basically, NN violations occur when someone drops packets that they otherwise would have carried, based on the content, source or destination of those packets. But paying more for a bigger or more direct pipe by itself is not an NN problem.
But in this context, it is about the providers of the "backbone" of the internet providing the same service to everybody. Usually, different companies and organisations had their public nets, and they allowed each others data to flow through their nets. They made so called "peering" agreements which are a bit intransparent, ISPs have to pay certain amounts depending on the traffic they cause. Then there are private connections that institutions use for themselves.
This is Google renting out their "private" net. What is different is that before, not many organisations had so massive private nets, and while you could buy traffic on them, this was something typically large organisations and companies negotiated (I know certain research institutes pay to have their data routed over a "direct cable" instead of over the regular network). Now, everybody can do so, and choose to pay for the faster route.
What they could have done instead would have been to sign peering agreements and add their connections to the "public" net.
Now, is this illegal or immoral? Well, they certainly have the right to rent out their private net. People have been doing that before. But I think net neutrality is not a binary question, but a continuum. If being able to afford a faster route means your site is faster, that violates net neutrality IMO.