Perhaps more bothersome is that the entire debate seems to suffer from a lack of information about the how prioritization will practically affect traffic. I think the place where prioritization will make the most difference is at the local ISP, as opposed to backbone providers. The local ISP can simply choose to ignore priority tagging, and even if priority get set one way on backbone links, if the local ISP doesn't want to honor those prioritizations, the benefits of prioritization I think will be significantly reduced. Yes, the prioritized traffic will make it through the backbones with better throughput, but it can still be bogged down at the local ISP if they choose to ignore priority.