"necessary" is always in relation to a preferred outcome. In your usage, this happens to be optimal economic performance when it comes to ISP. Now, first of, note that government interference int the ISP business does not in any way guarantee that there will actually be any improvement after all, how many times have we seen the government screw up even the simplest of maneuvers. Regardless, let us set aside that point for now. Consider what we are getting and what we are giving up for it. We are getting a marginal improvement in the efficiency of bandwidth providers, an improvement that future technologies (ie. WiMAX, etc...) may give us in time anyway, and in exchange for it, we are giving the government (specifically the FCC) permission to interfere and pass arbitrary mandates on IT companies. How long before the FCC uses this newfound authority to pass a patently idiotic proposition. Is the gain in efficiency worth this risk? In the case of BT throttling (and indeed for mast cases), I think the answer is, by a very large margin, no.