I think this is a great solution to this discussion. Customers should be charged transparently for a given QoS, and not secretly manipulated for a good average

I think this is a great solution to this discussion. Customers should be charged transparently for a given QoS, and not secretly manipulated for a good average QoS for the network. The only problem is complexity for both users and applications. Ideally you would have a set of pipes with different parameters and assign each application the right to use some pipes -- e.g. voip gets a slow and stable while torrent gets a fast but unstable one (but the assignment is your choice). Of course, those should be regionally consistent so that companies can't extort money from users of known traffic types (e.g. I know a priori Joe uses voip a lot so I'll raise his voip-optimal cost). Consumers may also not be very happy with an inconsistent pricing, though. Some misconfigured app could use ton of expensive bandwidth. But this has to be worked out, it's essential for the future of the net; we can't be completely at the mercy of ISPs as the gatekeepers of content.