The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do.
They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead.
(With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.) We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. Some history may help explain the situation. It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity. This is what one might call a net-discrimination rule, and, if enacted, it will profoundly change the Internet as a platform for free speech and small-scale innovation.
