You might configure your household router to favor VoIP traffic over your torrents and that's fine. The problem comes when ISPs, especially the large ones, do

You might configure your household router to favor VoIP traffic over your torrents and that's fine. The problem comes when ISPs, especially the large ones, do things that stifle competition. A good example would be having AT&T get away with degrading the quality of service for VoIP providers. It would be easy for them to stifle video providers. The case I picked is a very obvious one since AT&T sells telephone service and fancies itself as a net cable-tv operator. But the situation is just as bad if they or another ISP give unfair advantage to some other big player. I agree that things are too complex for a one line law. At the end of the pipe, consumers should be given the bandwidth they pay for regardless of the data type/port. And traffic should be treated equally upstream. The majority of people in the U.S. are getting a very poor deal on "broadband" compared to a number of other nations. Much good came from the breakup of AT&T way back when. But through corrupt regulators the cancer has grown back. We've got many problems. Some are the result of our rights being sold off. The U.S. public lost a huge chunk of the UHF t.v. spectrum with the digital change over. We could have had a bunch of bandwidth for free community based networking. But almost all of it has gone to the major players. If you don't think the wprocess was corrupted, look at the lack of diversity in ownership (and lack of local ownership) of broadcast stations. Besides functioning as leeches to suck money out of local economies, the narrowing of diversity in the selecting/gathering of music and news is very unhealthy. It's gone past having large players like Clear Channel owning huge numbers of stations. Now it's venture capital groups. The role of broadcasters as trustees of the public interest (and each broadcaster has a LOCAL public to serve) is not filled well.