> But I only want to pay a premium for a fast connection to certain websitesWhat the cable companies are trying to do isn't about you, the user, paying a premium for faster access; it's about you, the user, and the web service provider, both paying a premium to your ISP for faster access--even though the service provider is already paying a premium to their own ISP for faster access to the Internet as a whole.
From the ISP's point of view, selling you faster access only to certain websites would probably be a lot harder, technically, than selling you faster access to the whole Internet, because the ISP would have to inspect every packet you send or receive to see whether it was part of a connection with a website you want faster access to. Plus, you would have to have the physical bandwidth present anyway, which means you could just as easily get faster access to the entire Internet. So I don't see how an ISP could sell you faster access to a limited set of sites any more cheaply than faster access to the Internet as a whole; in fact it seems to me that it would be more expensive to do the former.
> Nor, in a perfect world, should it be illegal for a website to cover this fee if the website can derive unusual profits from it.
Websites that can benefit from faster access already do this in the real world: they put their content on CDNs--or in extreme cases, like Google or Facebook, they build their own CDNs--and spend extra resources in other ways to give users faster access to their content.
What I think you're missing in all this is that the cable ISPs do not (currently) own the entire Internet; they only own their own networks. That means they can only extract artificial scarcity rents from their own customers, not from the rest of the Internet. What they would like to do is to effectively own the entire Internet so they can extract artificial scarcity rents from everybody.