This got me thinking. Yes, another off the wall idea. If telcos are dead set on strong-arming content providers and begin privileging some packets over others, how might the major content providers respond? Imagine, what BellSouth customers would think if all of a sudden Google, Yahoo and MSN disappeared!? Instead, perhaps, they got a page saying something like:

We apologise for the inconvenience, performance of our services is degraded by your ISP and we therefore do not provide them for [name of your ISP here]. We recommend you switch to [name of competing non-tiered ISP here with hyperlink]. Sincerely, [your friendly neigborhood association of major content providers].

I mean, I don't see why the telcos should be allowed to leverage their position through packet inspection and content providers shouldn't be allowed to do the same. It just emphasizes what a bad bad bad idea this is and how it undermines some of the basic tenets of the internet architecture as envisioned by Cerf et al.