There's a technical reason for this. The Internet2 project spent a lot of time and effort working on things like prioritized traffic to deal with congested link

There's a technical reason for this. The Internet2 project spent a lot of time and effort working on things like prioritized traffic to deal with congested links. They found that it was easier and more cost effective to just add more bandwidth than it was to design and roll out protocols that would deal with a lack of bandwidth. For more info, read this: https://www.webcitation.org/5shCiXna8 https://www.webcitation.org/5shCiXna8 A noteworthy quote: > In those few places where network upgrades are not practical, QoS deployment is usually even harder (due to the high cost of QoS-capable routers and clueful network engineers). In the very few cases where the demand, the money, and the clue are present, but the bandwidth is lacking, ad hoc approaches that prioritize one or two important applications over a single congested link often work well. In this climate, the case for a global, interdomain Premium service is dubious. "Premium service" in this document refers, basically, to an upgraded Internet with additional rules to provide quality of service for congested links. (I'm not personally claiming that all these conclusions are correct and that they still apply today, just that there's some backstory here.)