The distinction is that in your proposed scenario the third parties are the ones deciding whether or not to travel across the bridge, so the only thing the cities can do is try to anticipate bridge usage and make sure they have enough lanes.
With the Verizon/Netflix relationship, Verizon upsells higher-speed plans by advertising better speeds for online services like Netflix. They already sell high-speed connections to their customers with advertised speeds far in excess of what you'll actually get when using a service like Netflix. So it is a bit intrinsically dishonest for them to try and pin blame for service congestion on Netflix when (generally speaking) other ISPs manage to deliver much higher connection speeds, closer to what customers are actually paying for.
So a better bridge analogue in this scenario would be if people paid up front for access to the bridge. Some people might pay for the bridge and use it rarely, other people might pay for the bridge and use it all the time. Anyone who pays for bridge access and uses it every day can rightly expect that they should be able to get across the bridge, and the bridge operators can try to cut costs by estimating actual bridge usage and investing a little bit less in lanes & other services. If they mess up their estimates, the people who pay to use full time will be delayed and get frustrated.
With the Verizon/Netflix relationship, Verizon upsells higher-speed plans by advertising better speeds for online services like Netflix. They already sell high-speed connections to their customers with advertised speeds far in excess of what you'll actually get when using a service like Netflix. So it is a bit intrinsically dishonest for them to try and pin blame for service congestion on Netflix when (generally speaking) other ISPs manage to deliver much higher connection speeds, closer to what customers are actually paying for.
So a better bridge analogue in this scenario would be if people paid up front for access to the bridge. Some people might pay for the bridge and use it rarely, other people might pay for the bridge and use it all the time. Anyone who pays for bridge access and uses it every day can rightly expect that they should be able to get across the bridge, and the bridge operators can try to cut costs by estimating actual bridge usage and investing a little bit less in lanes & other services. If they mess up their estimates, the people who pay to use full time will be delayed and get frustrated.