Enjoy it while it lasts

Today, every site on the Internet is equally accessible to you, but tomorrow, using traffic engineering, the telcos will have the equivalent of high speed and low speed channels on the Internet backbone, and will seek revenue for the high speed channels. E.g., if google.com pays the fee and yahoo.com doesn't, google will load faster and more reliably in your web browser than yahoo. It will take a very determined world-wide uniform regulation to keep this from happening. Telcos say that this will apply only to new services, such as video-on-demand; it remains to be seen. The argument the telcos have is also a good one - why should they invest in the backbone if they cannot raise revenues from that investment?

So, eventually, the vast majority of web-sites will be connected via the equivalent of country lanes, while the large business websites will have superhighways to your door.