[josho]

I understand the difference, my point was simply acknowledging that not all traffic is equal, so I have no problem to pay extra to ensure that the traffic that is important to me is given a priority. I do that today by paying for more bandwidth than I need. Alternatively, if bandwidth were a limited resource, then I'd consider paying to shape my traffic (either by paying for a better router to apply QoS rules in my own network or pay my ISP to take care of that on my behalf).

Comcast, however, wants to flip this around, so that even if I have bandwidth to spare they seem to be purposefully slowing down traffic (or under provisioning their own bandwidth) to force the Youtube's, Netflix's of the world to pay more.

TL;DR: all data is not equal; traffic shaping is 'ok' in theory; Comcast is evil, so please god don't let them artificially create slow lanes to force those willing to pay into the fast lanes.