What happened to the quite simple idea of me giving money to an ISP in return for unfettered access to the Internet?

Oh, that's right... ISPs oversell bandwidth in the hope that most people don't [try to] saturate their connections. Then when they do, the ISPs come up with b.s. excuses like piracy to throttle customer's connections.

I'm not saying piracy isn't a problem, but the ISP's job is to [p]rovide [I]nternet [s]ervice, not decided what I should or shouldn't be able to do on the Internet.