> Different traffic has different requirements & performance characteristics. From a pure engineering perspective, this is a very poor decision and treating all traffic equally provides artificial and often unnecessary constraints.

Banning paid prioritization does not stop the ISP from prioritizing traffic for engineering reasons.

What it bans is prioritizing traffic because a content provider paid for their traffic to be prioritized. For example, Amazon would not be able to pay to have Amazon video prioritized over Netflix video, and Netflix would not be able to pay to have Netflix video prioritized over Amazon video.

what would be so bad about that? doesn't that mean that we would have to "regulate" every successful business, because they could use their additional profit to gain "unfair market advantages"?

Suppose my ISP has oversold their bandwidth (which they all, of necessity, do). I'm trying to watch Amazon. My neighbor is trying to watch Netflix. My ISP doesn't have the bandwidth to give us both a good video experience, and so has to choose which of us will get inferior service.

Let's say I only watch video occasionally. My neighbor watches all the time. I consume maybe 5 GB a month. He consumes 1000 GB.

Me and my neighbor have the same tier of service, and are paying the ISP exactly the same amount.

You really don't have a problem if Netflix were allowed to pay my ISP to make sure that my neighbor's video watching gets priority, so he gets a great video performance, and mine sucks?

Thank you for the example. However, I thought that's quintessentially part of competition in a free market. Who would prevent netflix from offering a better service, make a deal with another ISP, allow other companies to offer products that fit your consumption and streaming habits better?

I actually can't tell if you're joking or not, because, well... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

I was not joking. Some additional consideration of how monopoly and deregulation plays into this discussion: http://youtu.be/5Z_nBhfpmk4?t=47m25s

Hmm, I watched from your starting timestamp for a good 10 minutes or so, and the point being made seemed to be that the government should have gone for ISP regulation sooner (or at least done something to prevent ISP monopolization sooner). Is that what you were getting at?

Different types of content have different requirements. Different content within the same type does not. This is not an issue of prioritizing VoIP over a large single file. This is an argument against prioritizing Company A's VoIP over Company B's VoIP.

Interesting, but I'm more concerned about prioritization of Skype over FaceTime because Microsoft pays Comcast more than Apple.