I think you're right that AT&T and Time Warner should not be allowed to merge. What you're proposing WRT the last mile is similar to what I favor, which is bann

I think you're right that AT&T and Time Warner should not be allowed to merge. What you're proposing WRT the last mile is similar to what I favor, which is banning content/copyright owners/studios from also owning the network infrastructure. There would be some subtleties there but I think it could be ironed out reasonably well. From an economic incentive perspective it just makes sense. Regarding QoS, why couldn't you as the client choose which packets are to be considered high-priority? Is it that you want to be able to saturate your connection with high priority packets that supercede your neighbor's packets if you're on a video call? Maybe a NN-friendly compromise is that everyone gets a % of their connection that get to be high-priority packets (you choose which) and you can pay more for a bigger pipe. Therefore if you want 1M up at high priority you need a 5M pipe. Your neighbor can keep their 1M pipe but only 200k of their packets can be high priority. (to throw out some numbers). It seems fair and gives you QoS options while not violating NN, which I think is overall more important than QoS anyway.