On Bandwidth Throttling

In light of the FCC's brief moment of enlightenment, whereby they ruled Comcast could no longer throttle bandwidth based on protocol (such as bittorrenting), I feel the need to take a moment to respond. In particular, I would like to respond to Comcasts backup plan to manage internet traffic. Comcast has announced a preliminary plan whereby "heavy bandwidth users" will have their connections artificially slowed down in order to make the traffic more manageable. It seems reasonable enough, there's only so much bandwidth to go around, and it makes no sense to let a few throughput hungry users take it all up during peak hours.

Perhaps a useful inquery is to consider why ISP's like Comcast or Verizon are selling subscriptions that their infrastructure can't actually withstand. It seems criminal to me, that these companies can advertise throughput speeds that they can't actually live up to. The telecom networks would not last very long if everyone using them was taking advantage of the bandwidth that they subscribe to.

My suggestion would be to tell the ISP's that they can only market connection speeds their networks could handle if every user were taking advantage of their full contract. Currently they weasel out of this by saying things like "speeds up to," and contracts say that the telecom is actually not responsible for the speed or quality of a connection. That seems backwards to me. They are providing a service, they ought to be 100% responsible.

This isn't even an issue of Net Neutrality, which I feel very strongly about. This is a basic matter of an industry that's gotten used to false promises and faulty advertising. If Verizon only promised me 10Mbits/s, I might be happily surprised when it peaks to 20 or 30Mbits/s, but I won't be angry when I only get 10.

What do other people think?