Marcel Winatschek

Fast Lanes

The pitch was always transparent: ISPs wanted money from big corporations in exchange for faster speeds. Everyone else got throttled. Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google—they’d pay, and the internet would become two-tiered. It was a naked money grab dressed up as technology.

What got me was that the internet had actually worked the other way. Some accident of early design meant your small website loaded as fast as anyone else’s. But once ISPs monetized the pipes, that was over. Indie sites would just be slow. Not from congestion. From policy.

The outcome was obvious enough to name: the internet would split into fast and slow. Pay or be second-class. That’s not competition. That’s rent extraction.

These cycles always play out the same way—petitions, politics, corporations waiting it out. But something in the defense of net neutrality stuck with me. What they were defending actually existed: an infrastructure that didn’t primarily extract value. Once you’ve seen that, you understand exactly what disappears when the rules change.