You could easily rework your post to comment on the federal government and it's color coded warning system. Hmm ... I wounder why they might want to keep the perception of impending doom alive ...

more or less gives them a license to discipline (oh, but only after some undisclosable anonymous source expresses 'concern', of course)

I know how this feels first hand. In the 6th grade my parents sent me and my two younger sisters to a private school. The Dean was pretty strict, but we were getting a good education, a lot of individual teacher attention and really exceeding in our studies. The second year the Dean decided that we (the students, not just me and my siblings) were rebels that needed to be controlled, which he thought he could do through a strict dress code. The kicker was that it was to be enforced even when we weren't at school. We (supposedly) were not allowed to wear jeans (ever) and the girls had to wear skirts or knee length shorts, always. Even on Saturday. That, and no "excessive jewelry".

We didn't stay much longer. These poor kids in the article though.. I don't imagine they have that luxury.

QOS is not what you need to focus on.

Latency in this application will kill your sound quality far more than a few dropped packets. Optimally you'll want to be under 300ms for things to be manageable.

The other main thing to look for is a CODEC you can use with your chosen provider that uses as little bandwidth as possible and supports loss concealment. You need to worry about those two factors long before QOS becomes relevant to the equation.

Wish I still had mod points for this one.

I fully agree if the user is distributing the software, they should be nuked, but I'd love to see the AUP/ToS for any ISP that dictated what software you could or could not run on your own machine.

If anyone actually read the documents (and does anyone still read EULAs, AUPs, and other such cruft?), they'd run so fast the ISP wouldn't see them go.

ISPs are responsible for, and thus should worry about, what their customers do WITH THE SERVICE THEY PROVIDE. That does not apply in your pot smoking example, or in the example given in the parent article.