At the end of the day we have a limited amount of bandwidth available and we can help matters if people co-operate where it is in their interests. Whether or not we choose to do so does not in any way justify using the fact that I have limited choices in bandwidth provider to ensure that my options for content and/or VOIP telephone service are similarly limited.
One area that might be fruitful for cooperation is in bulk time shifting of traffic. I am not so much talking about packet level prioritization here. I am thinking more of when I choose to back up my systems over the net.
The way I look at it, the net is a bit like the power grid in that there is an opportunity to reduce capacity requirements by shifting tasks from peak to off-peak. In particular I have several RAID arrays that I would like to back up with a total of something like 2Tb of data.
At present there is no incentive for me to play nice other than the risk that my activities will clog my local net. In fact it is arguably in my interest to do at least some of my backups at peak time when I am not using the net since that encourages my ISP to upgrade their circuits. I don't actually do that but others might.
It would be nice if there was some way that really high bandwidth apps that can tolerate long latency could negotiate a good time to do this sort of thing so as to minimize inconvenience.
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