Netflix first offered to put a CDN within the Verizon network, at Verizon's cost. Saying "Here, take my rackmount server and stick it in your network, but I'm not going to pay you your rate for hosting a data intensive colocated server". Fuck that.
And, not, technically speaking, that is not throttling and paid prioritization. It may be in spirit, I don't deny that, but it's also something that you can't really police. You can't force companies to upgrade all of their peers to maximum incoming and outgoing bandwidth at their own cost. It's not an industry practice, it's not lawful, it's not reasonable.