We are not talking about charging different amounts of money depending on the brand of device you are consuming the data on. NN is about not differentiating the cost or quality of bits based on their source. In the US, can you not opt to pay a slightly higher rate for renewable energy? (This happens in Australia).

I'm all for NN, but the analogy Sam used doesn't hold in my opinion.

As an additional thought from someone outside the US: NN doesn't exist in places like Australia, and has actually overall led to better services, especially in the early days of the internet, because overseas data is significantly more costly to provide than local data. The difference is that we have more robust competition and we can more easily switch providers, where is seems in the US (purely based on things I've read on the internet) that the near-duopoly cuts consumer choice, so if NN was not in place, people would have little ability to switch providers, and they would be stuck with it.

Is the lack of competition the real issue here? If people in the US had a choice of many providers and it was easy to switch, then people would likely switch to services that are Net Neutral.

Yes. Governments -- from federal to small towns -- created rules giving de facto local monopolies to certain ISPs and making market entry of competition very difficult. And yet, people want to solve this created problem with more rules about how ISPs are allowed to compete.