Network Neutrality Running Out Of Lives, Which Will Affect Ours

[Commentary] Open Internet. Net neutrality. Whatever you want to call it, it appears to be dying. And if you’re wondering whether you should mourn its death, might as well get that black suit ready.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler appears poised to propose rules (to be voted on at a May 15 meeting) that would officially make preferential treatment of network traffic OK. That is, content providers that want to make sure their online offerings are delivered smoothly and quickly would pay ISPs for the pleasure. However the FCC and others try to paint the new rules, the codifying of what essentially are faster lanes to certain content violates the concept of net neutrality. It could lead to degraded speeds and quality of the flow of content from providers that won’t or can’t pay Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or others. What, then, could that mean? It means that the Googles and Apples and Yahoos and Facebooks and even Netflixes of the world would pay (some of them already do) to play. But what about the startups and smaller companies that have the potential to be the next Netflix? This is what longtime net neutrality proponents have been talking about: Pay to play could kill innovation. And if the tolls start to hurt the big Internet companies’ bottom lines, it wouldn’t be a stretch to expect them to pass along those costs to us, their users, whether that’s in the form of higher subscription fees or downgraded or canceled services. In other words, we lose. And the double-dipping ISPs win.