Consider that other high volume of patent filing countries such as Norway (7.10), Israel (3.10), Singapore (12.39), and Canada (9.10) have much higher non-resident filing ratios. Therefore among its peers, the effect of non-resident filings vs. resident filings in the US is comparatively minimal.

Competition in the Last Mile Broadband (over 2Mbps) market will drive this discussion:
We have the local:
Cable Company,
The Incumbent (ILEC/RBOC)
The CLEC and or WISP
We also have the emerging Muni based Wireless Mesh Provider.

All of the above have a vested interest in this market and will compete aggressively for these Gamers who are willing to pay for an enhanced Last Mile Connnection.

It is not the Last Mile that is the problem with Latency/Jitter. It is the Internet itself and the centralized MultipLayer Gaming (Hosted) sites that are trying to dominate this class of user. Try using a real FPS over these networks much less a VoiceIP link between gamers.
What needs to be done here is for the entire community of gamers, developers/publishers/distributors etc to address the real solution and that is:
Local Placement of Gaming Platforms (Server) tied by big pipes to all the major Hosted Sites.
This will allow players Low Latency/Jitter links to Local Based Servers for Intra-Network playing between subscribers (Service Providers customers) as well as an optional link (and pay) when required to allow for these players to link to major National Hosted Game Sites. This will allow the local Service Provider to offer special premium links to their subscribers for local gaming as well as option to link to National Hosted Servers via a dedicated High Speed Internet connection.
The major Hosted Service providers overhead to allow the local placement of their Server platform is minimal since the local Provider would provide and maintain the server platforms and the major hosted provider would only need offer a Tech Support hotline and access (for a fee) to the Gaming Server Software.
Until this is done you will have these local providers manipulating the last mile to their benefit, since they have to pay for the bandwidth/links etc.

Jacomo
aka Bruto (WOW)

1) My ISP decides that the packets I am sending and receiving are low priority and do not merit a low latency and thus increases my ping or cuts me off completely. My response is to immediately cancel my service and go with an ISP that does have my interests as their customer in mind.

2) My ISP or another ISP decides to offer a service that will provide me with high priority, very low latency packet transmission. My response: I switch to the better provider.

Either way, companies realize that there is competition for the product and if they take away a service that the customer wants, they will lose that customer to the competing company that provides it. If an ISP wants to go about things smarter, I would say the best way would be that rathen than taking away from your current customers, add features on another plan or make a new plan that incorporates better features which will entice the competition’s customers away and encourage your existing users to upgrade.

Right now, it’s not the telcos who are hurting us, it’s the dumb guy running Bittorrent on your cable pipe. The report is correct in saying latency and jitter murder VoIP. That’s true – they murder gaming too. The report is technically inaccurate in asserting that more bandwidth solves the problem. This is not true. Bittorrent sucks up every mbit of bandwidth available: give it a T1 and you’ll still have latency and jitter.

Badly-written “Net Neutrality” will kill the net.