I was referring to 'privacy' in the sense of knowing who you are, who you're communicating with, and what traffic you're sending. An ISP must know some of those things before they can impose any of the Very Scary scenarios invoked in the article.
Assuming full end to end encryption (eg: TLS) an ISP has to know who you are (source IP) and who you are talking to (destination IP) there is absolutely no way around that if you want to use the internet; that's just how networking works.
One way to cut the ISP out of the loop is to use a VPN so all your ISP sees is you (the source IP) talking to your VPN provider but this just shifts the "who knows who you're talking to to" the VPN provider (who may have these restrictions as well). Tor offers good* anonymity but if you start steaming videos over Tor you're going to have a bad time.
Yes the ISP needs to know who you're talking to to apply these limits so a VPN can help bypass things like speed limiting but many services like Netflix block VPN providers (to stop people getting round region locks etc...), alternatively ISPs could just start limiting all traffic to your VPN provider as they would to Netflix or YouTube.
The issue is that ISPs want both parties to pay for bandwidth (you with your subscription, the providers with peering), don't pay? your users suffer, so your business suffers, so pay the protection racket to make sure your packets reach where they're supposed to.
* Good enough for most people trying to be anonymous, but there are still multiple attacks possible to reveal who you are if you're targeted and sloppy.
So your argument against "better privacy tech" is that existing privacy tech have problems?
Your VPN complaint is bunk when each person can have their own VPN in any region for ~$5/month. And no, blacklisting IPs is not cost effective for any ISP--either there are too few people that it's not worth the effort or you blacklist a huge swath of IPs and their owners just cycle the address of their VPN (leaving the ISP with a huge blacklist of non-VPNs).
