The FCC is about to turn the Internet into airport security

[Commentary] Allowing Comcast or Time Warner Cable to build fast lanes on the internet means that they'll have enormous incentives to push everyone towards them -- and almost no incentive to improve the miserable standard experience in the slow lanes, which will remain expensive and congested.

Want Netflix to work better? Just pay Comcast a little more. You're a social networking startup that wants to take on Facebook? Better factor in the ISP tax to make sure your content loads as fast as Zuckerberg's. This is basically free money for broadband providers; Comcast throttled Netflix traffic for years, but when the company finally broke down and paid, speeds shot up 65 percent.

This is lawyer-money, not engineer-money. Everyone involved should feel dirty. Let's call the opposite of net neutrality broadband theater: the cable industry will claim it's spending a lot of money on innovation to make us feel better, but absent any competition or oversight, the rest of us will end up standing around like most of us do in airport security, with no shoes on, wondering where our dignity went.