Comment by Ugohcet

The thing with ISPs is the small guys are more likely to have to pay, and the smaller you are the more likely you are to pay more.

If you are a Tier 1 ISP, everyone is willing to pay you to carry their traffic and other Tier 1s just make peering agreements with you.

If you're johnscheapvps.com, you're likely to pay all your upstream ISPs for your traffic. If you're GCP or, say, digitalocean.com, everyone would love to be paying you to get faster access to all the sites hosted on your platform (and because paying you is probably going to be cheaper than their regular upstream)