The argument that ISP's should be able to throttle because network admins do it, is beyond retarded.
Network admins for companies do it because they purchase a fixed amount of bandwidth, and want to ensure that certain vital services are not slowed, this is because as a company, you can never have too much bandwidth.
On the other hand, for an ISP, the only traffic shaping they should be doing, is providing you with the throughput you paid for, for example, if you pay for a 1 gigabit connection, then assuming the server you connect to allows it, you should be able to send test documents, or video, or cat pictures, or anything else at 1 gigabit per second. It is not up to the ISP to decide what traffic you should be allowed to get the speed you are paying for. How would you feel if you purchased a 1 gigabit connection for your company, and the ISP felt that the only traffic that should run at above dialup speeds on your gigabit connection, is text communications through AOL instant messenger?
When you purchase an internet connection, you are purchasing based on throughput, e.g., you buy a 100 megabit connection, and you decide how you want to use that throughput. The ISP really has no right to punish you for using the throughput you pay for.
Imagine if you buy a house and the bank comes around and kicks you out because even though you purchased the entire house, they didn't expect you to use all 3 bedrooms on a daily basis?
If the ISP is unable to supply everyone with the speed they par for, then they should be forced to upgrade, or not charge for the service that they are unable to deliver.
The ISP business model will not work anywhere else. Imagine going into a pizza shop and you and 4 other people order a large pizza, but there is only 1 large pizza ready and the owner of the shop does not feel like making more pizzas, so he or she takes the money for the full price of a large pizza from each of the 4 customers, and then gives each customer 1/4th of a pizza. In that case, no one would pay or the police may get involved.
PS verizon also throttles netflix.The performance of the service is consistently horrible 24/7. if it was congestion based, then peak hours should perform worst than off peak hours, e.g., 3 AM.