I'm not necessarily defending the practice, but I think there's some misunderstanding or misinformation here. Where are you getting the idea that wireless providers can charge a company for preferred treatment?

What I see is wireless companies charging the consumer for application-level prioritization. You're welcome to argue it's a slippery slope, and I personally don't like it because I think it violates at least the philosophy of neutrality. That said, when we're taking about a consumer being able to pay for prioritization of a particular type of usage (eg video conferencing or gaming), there's no question that's entirely different than NetFlix paying a wireless carrier for preferential treatment.

"The FCC's draft order opens the door to these fast lanes, so long as the app provider isn't charged for them."

By 'cash' the OP of this comment meant money, not physical dollar bills in a savings account.

Apple has $10 billion in cash, yes, but they have very roughly $150 billion in cash+short term investments+long term investments. Most people refer to that number colloquially as Apple's cash.

So technically yes, Apple does have the means to completely purchase Intel at Intel's current market cap, but they would never make such a large acquisition.

This is hilarious. The transport layer can theoretically handle this perfectly well, via UDP multicast.

But here we are, implementing a multicast-like streaming system higher in the stack to overcome the fact that most ISPs have disabled multicast at their routers. If something like this takes off, maybe this would actually encourage ISPs to enable multicast.

Also, I find this whole development awfully similar to the fact that many firewalls block everything other than HTTP on port 80, so now many apps have just moved to talking HTTP on port 80, or inventing pseudo-protocols on top of HTTP.

Ahhh, the Internet...