I’ve been saying for decades now that as you folks increasingly insist on using the Internet as inefficiently as possible – overloading it with all sorts of high-bandwidth stuff AND demanding low latency – it was going to be inevitable that ISPs would extend the concept of paying for quality-of-service from the “last mile” connection through the rest of the system.
And in fact this is nothing new. Game companies have been trying to negotiate for prioritized connections for years, to try to keep their latencies as low as possible.
“Bribes” would be a problem. But network neutrality does not necessarily preclude offering multiple tiers of service, as long as everyone has equal access to all tiers at the same prices and those prices are not unreasonable… and as long as basic service is adequate for most non-sloppy purposes.
