They pay transit providers to do it. Except with Comcast, who they pay directly. And save a lot of money by doing so.
In other words, we're already in the double-dipping situation I'm decrying. The "we each pay our ISPs" scenario that I described and that you quoted is now, sadly, a hypothetical.
Now they are using the biased tech media to create a campaign whereby they will lower their costs even further and shift them onto others (including you and me).
In a reasonable free market, none of this discussion would matter. The agreements would all shake themselves out in the marketplace. But give a company a monopoly and suddenly they're not subject to the same forces. Between Netflix, Cogent, and Comcast, only one of them is a monopoly.