So many people may not realize that this sort of thing has happened and does happen in the US.

Some may not know how large ISPs connect to each other. If you're sufficiently large, you basically get to peer for "free". There are common peering points where most of this happens. Now, how does traffic travel between ISPs? WWell, routing protocols (notably BGP4) dictate how these connetions are used.

Thing is, providers can directly and indirectly throttle traffic with all this. A famous example is where several US ISPs, notably Verizon FiOS (from my own experience) to Netflix. There was a time about a decade ago where in the evening you could get <500kbps and Netflix was unwatchable. Verizon alternated between denying it and saying it was a technical limitation.

But lo and behold if you just used a VPN to bypass Verizon's routing and peering Netflix was completely watchable.

Many believe (myself included) this was intentional to try and kill Netflix and prop up their declining cable TV business.

It was intentional - on Netflix’s part. They intentionally picked a partner with little or no peering agreements, and then started dumping terabits of traffic on “peers” and demanding peering agreements.