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I'm not quite as optimistic as UT, for very meta reasons.
The big ISPs are trying to combine two distinct issues--and, so far, seem to have a decent chance of succeeding.
The problem of bandwidth allocation is a technical issue. How do we make sure that a small handful of people don't overwhelm the available capacity? There are straightforward ways to do this, by metering and limiting how much people use. I mean "straightforward" in a technical sense, not a marketing or political one. Pay-per-use internet service has not been commercially viable in the consumer sphere since, maybe the early 90s?
The problem of preferring certain traffic over others is a business issue. The ISPs want this to happen because they see it as potential revenue from content providers, and potential competitive advantage in cases where the ISPs themselves are serving the content. Some large non-ISP content providers want it to happen too because they think they can use it to muscle around smaller competitors. Be that as it may, for the most part the issues in this category do not have any bearing at all on technological capabilities. For the most part--clearly with things like high-quality streaming video you have overlap between the two categories. But really, do sites like cnn.com and nytimes.com cause resource hogging on today's Internet? Please.
Now, to make a massive overgeneralizaton: Most people feel the technical issue of bandwidth capacity is a legitimate problem, or at least a legitimate potential problem. Most people feel that the desire of ISPs to favor some providers over others for business reasons is horseshit and shouldn't be allowed.
Yet, if the ISPs and/or "big content" are successful in conflating the two issues, we run the risk of a solution to Part A carrying a very convenient way to address Part B through the back door.
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