Treating video bits differently from image and text bits is exactly a net neutrality issue, it’s content-based filtering

IMO, as a fairly staunch NN defender - no it's not. But only so long as the limiting is applied equally to all video providers, including Verizon's own.

Traffic shaping (QoS) according to protocol is nothing new, and it can actually generally improve responsiveness for everyone given a congested network. If my VOIP packets have exactly the same priority as your Netflix - I'll be the one to suffer for it. On the other hand, if my VOIP has higher priority than your video, I'll get a good VOIP session, and thanks to buffering, you will still probably get the same quality video.

The overall drop in bandwidth being offered sucks, but it also seems a bit more honest than their previous "unlimited" offerings.

Again, this is only the case in my eyes so long as Verizon doesn't start offering a fast lane for certain providers. If (probably more "when" than "if") they start doing this, then I'll gather up my torch and pitchfork and join in the fun.

But the question then becomes, is it a good or bad thing? Is it better to pay $10 per GB, or is it better to not have to worry about gigabytes, with the caveat that video (which happens currently be a high bandwidth consumer) gets throttled? Then add onto it that the video quality for many consumers is still more than adequate for the size of screen they are dealing with.

Personally, I don't do video over LTE, but I would like to use the mobile hotspot feature on my phone more often without having to worry about going over. And as long as it is enough for me to use ssh, RDP, or VNC, then I'm good. Other people, of course, have different requirements.

Yep, everyone has different requirements. And I think we have tested the world where, those different requirements all being equal, has served customers well. And innovation for that matter -- if video had a shotgun to it's back during its formative technology years who knows what kind of crappy technology we'd be dealing with right now.

I'm kinda in the same boat where I'm not someone who is just churning through video bandwidth, im rarely hitting 5GB across 2 phones on a heavy month. But that said I also would like to get great quality for the videos I do watch, and occasionally I'll throw a video to a tv and there you can definitely appreciate higher bandwidth there. I mean, I don't see the problem with the world where you can let applications & operation systems present choices to users, who will then set sensible defaults / pick and choose / etc. Enforcing this on a network layer is a pretty extreme measure.

But RDP and VNC are essentially streaming video over the internet. How would they make that distinction?

You can identify traffic flows based on any number of characteristics, port number, protocol, and data payload to name a few.

As long as I can get 10 frames per second on a remote desktop, I'm good.

It's not filtering, it's not blocking anything based on the contents of the content or it's origin just the bandwidth it will use. Sorry but i don't see how throttling some one to oh boy only 720p is a problem... Even the fact that they have 480/720p packages now isn't an issue, Netflix charges you extra for 4K also.