right now with the rise of ASIC miners the 'voting' power of which version of the protocol is run is in the hands of larger and fewer miners.
this reduces the decentralized effect of bitcoin.

we must also take into account that the set 'block reward' is getting smaller with time, halving every 4 years.
as the network scales up more % of the total block reward is going to come from transaction fees.
at some point in time transaction fees will amount to the major part of block rewards.

question: if i pay a fee for my transaction, can the protocol limit who is capable to mine this transaction and collect the fees with his block rewards [ for example only a miner running the same or lower version of bitcoin] ?

having such a function will assure that in time, when the system is matures enough, market laws will allow voting to return to the users.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority