Today, flows crossing the Internet are not equally sensitive to loss or delay variations. Since several years, lot of research has been done to enhanced the IP stack to solve the problem of the different needs of the heterogeneous traffic. In the light of the frustrating experience of existing IP QoS approaches, we present a new differentiated service scheme called EDS : "Equivalent Differentiated Services". The EDS can be deployed incrementally and provides "different but equal services". This new scheme allows to differentiate a number of N traffic classes on loss and delay without giving an absolute better service to anyone. This proposition represents a radical departure from traditional "Diff-Serv" architectures which rely on bounded domain concept and pricing models. In this paper we look at the goals of this "soft" quality of service architecture. We present the principles and implementation details of the EDS scheme. Finally we examine the transport layer issues and perspectives within our framework.