In some situations throttling is the best solution. It depends exactly what criteria is being used and what the motivations are. Outlawing any type of ISP throt

In some situations throttling is the best solution. It depends exactly what criteria is being used and what the motivations are. Outlawing any type of ISP throttling without making some exceptions is a bad idea. For example in the past I've seen throttling used to dampen the impact of ISP uplink outages. BitTorrent and Usenet get slower but most people browsing HTTP don't notice that the ISP has lost 50% of its uplink capacity for 4 hours. Is that a bad thing? What about smaller ISPs? This impacts rural users quite a lot. We focus on Verizon, Comcast, TWC, Cox, etc but there are scores of smaller cable ISPs in the US who simply don't have the money to do large scale network upgrades required to offset 2% of their users being bandwidth hogs. Should they go out of business? Raise prices? Implement strict bandwidth caps? or throttle the 2% of users at peak hours? For the bigger ISPs the turnaround times, planning and budgeting of upgrades is never perfect. Sometimes there are gaps due to mismanagement (solvable), vendor/partner delays (not so much so), weather delays (nope) or other things out of your control. Between upgrades do you let everyone suffer with slow speeds or just throttle the 5% of people using 50% of the bandwidth? It's really not a clear cut issue. We also have to consider that the alternative to intelligent throttling are strict bandwidth caps and metered billing. I would prefer the top 5% be throttled or pay more.