I was trying to remember how this reared its ugly head a year or two ago under a different name but I couldn't find it. Wired does a good job with this older article showing the history of the communication companies' endeavors and how far it stretches back:
http://www.wired.com/2013/11/so-the-int ... eutrality/
If my memory serves me right, the version that was shot down a year or two ago focused less on the angle of fast lanes and more on the efforts of an ISP deciding what they would and wouldn't offer to their customers through the service they were providing similar to this:
Replace BitTorrent with something else today that would provide a competitive threat, like say Netflix, and you can get a glimpse of their efforts.Wired wrote: It turns out that around the same time (Circa 2006), Comcast had begun secretly trialing services to block some of the web’s most popular applications that could pose a competitive threat to Comcast, such as BitTorrent.
Anywho, the FCC vote begins in about 9.5 hours. I have to say, things like this make me nervous when so many folks are on the same bandwagon. To clarify, I'm a big fan of net neutrality, but by making X out to be the bad guy so everybody supports Y can be a very effective misdirection to get people to savagely embrace something that might negatively impact them later. What if the next item in the pipeline creates tiered data plans for your home internet service rather than tiered bandwidth allocations because we've now defined it as a utility.
I wonder what will happen.