Who owns the internet?
Currently in the US they are having a big debate about Net Neutrality. The companies that own the backbone wiring want to throttle their bandwidth based on subscription deals. Currently all traffic is permitted to flow freely across everyone's network without any additional charge or discrimination.
The companies are wanting to change it. (These are made up business relationships) Verizon wants to be able to sign a deal with Disney that gives Disney's packets preferential treatment as far as bandwidth comsumption. So if two people on Verizon's backbone are each downloading information from Disney and Disney's competitor, the Disney download will finish first.
Without getting into the reasons "how the companies got the backbone", that seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to me. Someone put together a map that shows how far the internet backbone is from a monopoly. This is just the North American map.
http://blogs.cio.com/node/209