I understand your argument. Did you see my line Yes, there are other solutions - a price per Gb of traffic is an obvious one. But my point is that I'm not convinced other options should be outlawed yet?
It makes the point that for VOIP to work properly over wireless you can't have jittery delivery. One way to solve that it to use QOS to increase the priority of that in comparison to video. That isn't "neutral" access, but it is good consumers.
As long as my neighbor and I are both paying the same ISP the same amount of money for an internet connection, then we should have the same probability of one of our packets making it through their network. If I'm making an FTP transfer and my neighbor is teleconferencing, it's fine for some of his packets to be delivered more quickly than some of mine, provided that over any given second, we get to transfer roughly the same amount of data. Until our ISP redefines itself as a telecom provider with ancillary FTP capabilities, their QoS strategies shouldn't benefit my neighbor at my expense.
If ISPs are allowed to discriminate significantly based on the protocol, then what's to stop them from inventing a new proprietary video transmission protocol and prioritizing that over any protocol used by YouTube, effectively reimplementing discrimination on the source or destination of traffic (which is the most obvious justification for net neutrality)?
Except that it won't be VOIP that's prioritized, it will be Skype, or Magic Jack, or whatever company offers Verizon the biggest kickback. It will be terrible for consumers, since those companies with a monopoly will have no incentive to excel when their success is determined in a backroom deal at Verizon HQ.
My point is that it may make sense - and be good for consumers - to deprioritize and/or discourage some kinds of usage over wireless. http://danweinreb.org/blog/google-and-verizon-a-new-hope references the story http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Government-IT/The-Truth-About-Googl.... I hadn't read this when I made my original post, but it makes a much more compelling argument based on the same ideas.
It makes the point that for VOIP to work properly over wireless you can't have jittery delivery. One way to solve that it to use QOS to increase the priority of that in comparison to video. That isn't "neutral" access, but it is good consumers.