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If ISPs decide to throttle traffic, they would need to do this all services to be effective, in which case it would probably be easier for them to charge by maximum speed like many ISPs did in the post, e.g. one price for 10Mbps, a higher price for 50Mbps and so on. Otherwise, it would be relatively straight forward to overcome with the use of a VPN. Let's say an ISP prioritises port 8080 to deliver fast speed tests while throttling everything else, just use something like OpenVPN over port 8080 with a VPN privacy service. To the ISP, all your traffic would be seen and treated as speed test traffic. For example, about two years ago the Irish cellular networks Three and Vodafone were doing something similar, i.e. throttling most traffic over the standard web ports (e.g. HTTP port 80), while letting port 8080 run at full speed to deliver fast speed tests, at least with the well-known Ookla Speedtest App. At the time, it meant one could get 4G speed tests over 20Mbps, yet faced slow browsing speeds similar to a 1Mbps connection. All I had to do was make a VPN connection over port 8080 (same port # as Ookla uses for its speed tests) and everything performed a heck of a lot better. A few months later, Three changed their tactic by prioritising certain services such as YouTube when the network is congested. This means YouTube can potentially play 4K fine even when the speed tests (including Ookla) deliver low test result figures.