Considering that customer satisfaction with the average telecom company is somewhere between that of the DMV and a crooked tax collector, it plays into the confirmation bias people have that they don't love their ISP, they tolerate their stupidity because its the only way to get online.
Telling a customer they're not getting what they paid for from their service provider is about as plain English as you can get. I daresay we need this sort of rhetoric, and I doubt their response will be levied toward Netflix unless they start getting letters from their ISPs saying "We're throttling you because you're watching Netflix and they won't pay up."
This situation could get ugly, though.
Verizon doesn't want more "cord cutters" of a sort to drop their FiOS video accounts in favor of a la carte offerings from Netflix et. al. AT&T's U-verse isn't as big a thing for them, but they use vicious caps to protect it, and of course all the cable companies are by definition video service providers.
The message is "The Verizon Network is Crowded Right Now." not "Verizon is Deliberately Slowing This Right Now." (or some less loaded version of that)
It's bad PR for the ISPs, but combined with the fact that most people can hardly spell ISP, and that Comcast and their FCC homies keep describing the new toll booth as a fast lane, if I were a nontechnical consumer my first response would be, "What the hell are they waiting for? Put in the fast lane! I wanna watch my damn movies!"