If it were considered "transit" in the same sense as delivering packets from one network to another across large distances, then consumer Internet access should be free because it's always biased in favor of receiving rather than transmitting bytes. Verizon should even be paying its customers to accept the extra bits they get.
I think you understand more than you admit ;-). The last-mile infrastructure is indeed a completely different beast, and Verizon is last-mile infrastructure. So backbone-to-backbone might be symmetric, but backbone-to-last-mile should never have been expected to be symmetric.
