Quality of Service is unnecessary? Is throwing more bandwidth at the issue really a solution?

I care because QoS is a form of technological norm that is very potent. It does have the capacity to shape the environment and influence the actions of people (or their effects). I can’t wait for my ISP, who is owned by a content provider, to throttle competitors, err… ensure proper QoS, to selected resources.

On the other hand, I find reasonable that there could be the Internet equivalent of a emergency siren for certain packets.

Would « official » and public implementation of QoS make it harder for people who control the infrastructure to implement opportunistic QoS-like schemes? Should Internet connectivity declared a public service and regulated as such from a competition point of view? In that last hypothesis, could QoS be implemented in a more productive way?

I find it hard to believe that bigger pipes will solve all QoS issues, but is it a good enough solution to reduce the annoyance level low enough that people won’t bother to elaborate on the issue?

[via… damn… can’t find it anymore… NetNewWire really needs a « find » function]

Update: Well… this issue made a few people react. Should I be surprised that it seems it was all started by Lessig?