The end of net neutrality could mean you pay for faster access to sites like Facebook

Ultimately, the internet could someday look like the current cable model where the internet service provider takes a portion of advertising revenue and subscriber fees. “This would be gradual and would most likely affect new services that would have been free, but we may now have to pay for,” said Marty Puranik, chief executive officer of cloud service provider Atlantic.Net. Despite high-resolution movies and virtual reality, and increased speeds, internet costs have not risen proportionately, especially given that the average American spends approximately 40 hours per week online, he said. That may change. Many people are familiar with the dreaded messages from phone service providers alerting them that the monthly data limit has been hit. We may soon see such alerts for our home internet usage, said Steven Andres, an information systems lecturer at the San Diego State University and expert on net neutrality. This makes most sense for companies, given the amount of content currently being served for free, said Robert Ricci, executive director of marketing at digital agency Blue Fountain Media.