I tend to agree. As an ISP owner, the problem is fundamentally the point to point technology involved along with lopsided peering agreements you can't avoid.
Torrents really expose these issues very well and it's the same sort of thing you see going on between Netflix and Comcast.
One solution is for consumers to have more choices. I recently read an article where some town I think in Colorado put in their Internet access by lighting up dark fiber they had. It use to be something the cable companies fought citing that municipalities could have a monopoly.
The other game changer is WiMAX and generally speaking, faster mobile data rates. If I no longer need my buried cable to get fast Internet coupled with the fact I can take my device with me, is a huge selling point.
But like cable companies, you can have traffic pile up on a cell tower but it seems easier to add more radios to a cell tower than it is to lay more fiber and/or coax.
Maybe the solution is to get rid of TCP/IP and use something different such that traffic can spray out like a torrent and be recollected from different route paths. For example, if you have Internet from two or more cable companies, there is no way to dynamically balance traffic between those two circuits between two parties. You have a default gateway and there isn't much more you can do with that at the end user level.