Starting with the telegraph.
Try streaming a two-hour high definition video over the telegraph. Doesn't work? That doesn't matter. Your little ISP is required by the federal government to provide that service to whoever wants it, and you have to charge the same price that you would for a two-line telegraph message.
Same concept, just newer technology. The law prevented the operators from giving some private traffic advantages over other traffic.
Sorry. That analogy doesn't work.
If you want to bring telegraphs into it would be like this
A --------- B ---------- C ---------- D
Alice sends a message to David
Charlie wants to charge Alice for forwarding the message along to David. --- Or Charlie will pass a message along to David from Bob right away, but if it comes from Alice, it gets delayed.
Net neutrality is what we have now, but you have ISPs like Comcast and ATT trying to bully Google into paying them to allow Alice, Bob, Charlie, or David to go to Google, by claiming that Google is getting a "free ride", even though Google pays for their bandwidth the same as Alice, Bob, Charlie, and David do.
These large ISPs don't want to be in the business of providing a commodity (bandwidth) to the market because margins on commondities are small. If they don't want to deal in commodities, they need to get in another line of business.