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Now, if the ISP has issues, it needs to change the deal or the price the next time contracts are renewed, or suck it up.

What they can't do is demand the provider sures up their bad business practices.

This is why it's a wicked problem. There are consumer protection regulations wrt telephony. So the most important being safety-of-life and being able to make 112/911 calls. Which includes challenges like also providing location information so emergency services can locate people who need urgent help. Problems with VoIP have resulted in people dying, hence why regulators take a closer look. But there has been lobbying to define VoIP as a 'data service' so it falls outside telephony regulations, but referring next of kin to clauses in terms of service is little comfort.

Rest is a combination of technical and commercial. The Internet and IP is fundamentally a 'best efforts' service, even though the standards define ToS bits in the headers, and those are widely used in private IP networks to prioritise real-time services like VoIP.

So technically, and morally, being able to prioritise telephony is a Good Thing(tm), and could have avoided the problems Windstream's customers experienced.

The commercial side is more complex. So people pay EA for COD. EA pays CDNs to distribute the game and patches. The CDN's pay for peering and/or transit to get that code to EA's customers, who pay their ISP for an 'up to X' service. Their ISP doesn't get anything from EA to cover the cost of delivering the game, and users who think COD is best served salted, battered and with chips might suffer problems.

So the common refrain is to just throw bandwidth at the problem. That can be hugely expensive, and may not solve the problem because IP sucks at traffic management. Slap a couple of 100Gbps links at the CDNs, and some congestion might be avoided, but then those connections idle outside of releas/patch days. And even though the content provider (ie EA) is causing the problem, terminating ISPs don't get any revenue from them to fix it.

So then the only option is to charge the ISP's customers more money, which is naturally unpopular.

There may be alternatives, like staggered releases, or incremental updates. I've noticed this with some games I play, so a small patch might result in a full game download. CDN's try to do some congestion avoidance, but apart from seeing packet loss, there's no easy way to see congestion across multiple ASNs. But it's technically obvious that permitting VoIP prioritisation would be a simple way to try and mitigate congestion issues.. But of course 'Net Neutrality' says no..