Shaping and prioritizing traffic can be done in a service-agnostic way, so the sorts of shaping they can make money off of are never "necessary." The anti-netw

Shaping and prioritizing traffic can be done in a service-agnostic way, so the sorts of shaping they can make money off of are never "necessary." The anti-network neutrality thing is just a money grab. Here's a good-enough traffic shaping algorithm: Each user gets their traffic put into two queues. High bandwidth flows go into a the low priority queues. Low bandwidth (video conferencing, interactive) flows go into the high priority queue. You round robin between all the users' queues at the local node level. If the trunk line is saturated by a few users, then their queues will be long, causing their flows to backpressure. Everyone else's queues will have ~ 1 packet in them, leading to no backpressure and negligible latency. It's extremely difficult to do better than the solution I just sketched. It is stateless, and it is also very easy to approximate in hardware. It even handles the "I want to torrent and VOIP at the same time" problem.