[danielweber]

Absolutely. Water companies regulate water usage of their customers. You're going to find that regulation is needed on any shared resource.

You're free to get a leased line that is private and just yours, but you will pay significantly more for that. The Internet lends itself so obviously to packetization and shared wires that it takes an extreme case to justify using a private network rather than sharing a public one.

There needs to be regulation to stop (say) the DSL company from impacting VOIP traffic. But a completely unregulated network will lead to the torrenters destroying the VOIP traffic just as fast.