Cloud providers are carriers. Their backbones are larger and growing faster than the ISPs you refer to. And they are hosting a lot of content and services from multiple providers. If they provide preferential treatment to their own products over products they host then this situation is no different to the one you're thinking of.
No, you are completely wrong. Cloud providers are not carriers, they are service providers(PaaS, IaaS.)
"Carrier" in this context(Net Neutrality) is short for telecommunications carrier, which are regulated by the FCC in the United States[1].
The classification is a legal one. It was refined by the Telecommunications Act of 1996[2]
AWS/Azure/GCE are neither regulated by the FCC nor classified as telecommunications carriers as they do not sell broadband access.
Simply owning you own "backbone" does not make you a carrier either. There are plenty of large corporations that own their own backbones that are not carriers. Being a carrier has nothing to do with hosting content either.
In this scenario (where we are exploring the issue of Net Neutrality) they perform the same function as carriers for a lot of the services you utilize on the internet. Legal distinctions are pointless to this discussion, because this discussion is about the appropriateness of those legal distinctions and regulations in the first place.
>In this scenario (where we are exploring the issue of Net Neutrality) they perform the same function as carriers for a lot of the services you utilize on the internet. "
No, fundamentally they(cloud providers) do not perform the same service as carriers. If I had Comcast as my ISP I could not call them up and cancel my service and then call up Amazon and say I would like to buy internet access.
Honestly, it doesn't seem like you understand how the different segments of the internet fit together - Tier 1 ISPs, last mile networks, transit, peering and service providers networks.
I need to pay the ISP or else I can not get to the services I am paying a cloud provider for. This is the whole issue. I am basically a captive consumer.
The debate has never been about classifying "cloud providers" as telecommunication carriers.
>"Legal distinctions are pointless to this discussion, because this discussion is about the appropriateness of those legal distinctions and regulations in the first place."
Legal distinctions are "pointless" in a discussion about federal oversight and regulatory jurisdiction? That is completely absurd.
> legal distinctions are pointless to this discussion
Legal distinctions are absolutely material to this discussion. You can't pretend they don't exist; you need to persuade representatives and their constituents that the current legal framework is outdated and is in need of revision.
