As the Wall Street Journal reports, "[r]egulators are proposing new rules on Internet traffic that would allow broadband providers to charge companies a premium for access to their fastest lanes."
What does this mean? As Tim Wu at the New Yorker explains, it's a zero-sum game, so the big, rich content providers will win out and everyone else will lose:
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. (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. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead.
Read the full New Yorker analysis here.
For some history, and to read about the fate of the FCC's last rule on net neutrality, see our previous guest post here.
