The question comes into play at the edges - when your ISPs upstream connection is filled what happens? Can they selectively drop packets or do they have to drop them randomly? And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group?
Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal.
> or do they have to drop them randomly?
Yes. This is the only reasonable approach.
> And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group?
No. That should be illegal to offer.
If the ISP's network is incapable of meeting their customer's demands during peak hours and they oversubscribed themselves so badly that they're contemplating such tactics then they ran their business dishonestly. They fraudulently made promises that they were incapable of delivering on and got caught. They need to fix their network or go out of business. And possibly should face legal consequences for their behavior.
> Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal.
This is correct for selection based on the remote endpoint. OTOH, it's very reasonable to drop packets selectively based on the local endpoint, so that packet loss affects customers who are actually using 90-100% of advertised bandwidth (eg for streaming), but not those using <10% for stuff like checking their email. (Arguably, local-selection should be required, to prevent the ISP from making anti-net-neutrality FUD along the lines of "my neighbor's Netflix is making my email not work" actually true.)
Why not ? From an engineering point of view, with a scarce resource, dropping only the biggest user (Netflix) looks reasonable.
Obviously, it should be illegal to ask money to do not have them dropped.
The decision of who is the biggest user needs to be made in realtime at the point of congestion, not identified on a quarterly basis by the accounting department and pushed out as policy across the whole network.
1. the destination customer can pay themselves into a tier such as "never drop" 2. the source customer cannot
That is, retain "money is power" for individuals but add a veneer of social respectability by denying Netflix etc. to just buy up the bandwidth.