Advocates of a free and open Internet could see this coming, but today's ruling from a Washington appeals court striking down the FCC's rules protecting the open net was worse than the most dire forecasts. It was " even more emphatic and disastrous than anyone expected," in the words of one veteran advocate for network neutrality.
One of my online friends observed about this: "Upgrade your cablemodem package to our gold tier, including Google access! Or enjoy our low-cost bronze package, with free Bing access!"
Another pointed out that Verizon and AT&T have already begun winding down their rollout of FIOS, because they'd prefer to get their customers onto 4G wireless Internet, where they can charge per gigabyte of data transferred.
The big thing for me, though, is the killing off of the open data-carriage policies that spawned so many innovations. Say hello to Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL-style online gated communities, because that's the Internet of the future that I worry these policies will lead to.
