I was also wondering about this scenario for further up the chain, before comments get moderated (or not), when an individual person chooses to pay money (by that I mean their own, without any kind of backer) to post a comment.
I don't quite see (yet?) how the "pay for faster connections" model would actually work with Internet sites that don't handle
lots of traffic, and short of nation-grade fake-posting organizations (and, of course, spammers), someone who's just a "commenter" doesn't seem to qualify. You don't reconfigure the Internet's backbone when Contrarian Connor plopped a handful of cash on the counter to upgrade his consumer-grade Internet access.
Speaking of which, I'm not sure that the non-enhanced net access is likely to result in an experience of a
slow Internet, either.
WFQ or not, in my experience, network congestion tends to result in the low-prio traffic to rather be mostly dropped on the floor. (And as long as Net Neutrality is in effect,
everyone is the same prio, and
everyone will complain to the carrier whenever it happens, which means that the carriers keep not liking this scenario to happen.) Maybe once the actual lines that the backbone consists of get segregated into straight-to-destination paying-customers-only and NYC-to-DC-via-Alaska good-enuf-4-U ones ...
Things like VOIP exist because small startups were able to plug in to an unbiased internet and get their signals treated the same as everyone else.
FWIW, VoIP (which works with limited bandwidth but is
very sensitive to delay and jitter) is
the prime example of traffic that routinely gets "express lanes" in the network even today. There are switches, routers, and ISPs which prioritize VoIP traffic by default. It's not nominally a violation of Net Neutrality because the decision is based on "VoIP or not?", rather than "extra-paying customer or not?", but if you imagine yourself as a net user who just
doesn't do VoIP, that's not much of a consolation, I guess.
(No contest on the "likely to cripple innovation" part, though.)
