[quote=Captain Jordan]
Except, the opposite is likely to happen. If startup.com isn't paying Comcast, why should Comcast serve traffic to startup.com faster than YouTube? YouTube is paying for the privilege of faster traffic, so it will get preferential speed, versus startup.com which can't afford to be in the fast lane. Your example depends on ISPs tolerating websites they begin to incur more difficult performance for the ISP. However, you know as well as I do that corporations are greedy, why should startup.com get to hook into the Internet for free when YouTube has to pay? There would be nothing that stops ISPs (except the FCC's bluff, which you can't really count on to save the Internet anymore) from charging Startup.com and Youtube, and relegating anyone who couldn't pay to the frontage roads and pothole-filled streets of the Internet, rather than the speedy expressways.
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That's what we're here for. If we want to access new sites we're going to subscribe to the ISPs that don't lock them out. Corporations are greedy, so if we want access, they'll sell it to us -- that's the only way to make a profit off us saps. Nobody makes money by refusing to sell us the things we want, so I don't think it's likely to happen. The question is going to be whether or not our demand is sufficient to drive the business. From all the uproar, it doesn't seem like that's going to be an issue -- but that's only speculation.