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Okay, you make some good points and I'm largely convinced away from my previous viewpoint.
But then, assuming we treat companies as indistinguishable endpoint users, why do ISPs need to demand that they specifically pay for infrastructure costs? Shouldn't that be baked into their business class service? Isn't the entire point of paying ISPs that they use the money for infrastructure? Is it just that there's an abnormally large amount of demand from a small number of servers that the regular infrastructure can't handle all at once? Does the increased usage from these companies not make their regular endpoint user costs abnormally high to compensate for this without special negotiations?
I think it's just a blend of the two things. Think again about telephone service circa 19XX, with some low value for XX. Telecoms have some reasonable expectation for the needs of most businesses, maybe tens to low hundreds of numbers. Then, some company like Sears changes the way they do business, shoots to the moon, and suddenly needs thousands of lines. You could imagine that the telecoms previously had written their regular endpoint user costs without even having the possibility of this use case in mind.
I can't find it now, but I recall seeing a picture of outdoor telephone lines in what I think was a European city back in the day, at like a central location. It was the most gawd-awful mess of just absolute spaghetti, worse than any "bad cable management in a server room" pic you've ever seen. But that was just, like, how they did things at that time. But now imagine Sears shows up and says, "We want to locate a call center in this city, and we need like thousands of lines, yo." The telecom might phrase it in terms of, "Yeahhhhh, we're going to need a new 'tier' in our list of regular endpoint user costs," or they might phrase it in terms of, "Dude, we simply need to completely redo our core infrastructure, because we can't scale to what you want with the way we've been doing things." It's probably some blend of the two, and they pretty much need to just negotiate it out. Hopefully, there's competition between possible providers and the telecom company isn't running their own business to compete against Sears, so that the result can plausibly be just a regular competitive negotiation. What I have less patience for is a company like Sears running to the newspapers and screaming about how horribly unfair it is that the telecom company won't just go to millions/billions of dollars of effort for free to accommodate their massive need.
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