The Gatekeepers

John Oliver did a segment on Last Week Tonight about net neutrality and cable companies in America. Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon—they want to charge Netflix and YouTube for faster access. It’s just throttling with a business card. Everyone else gets slower speeds, those companies pay, and the internet becomes a utility for people who can afford it.

I’m not even sure why Oliver bothers explaining it. The mechanism is obvious, the motivation is obvious, and it will happen. It’s already happening in pieces. What’s less obvious is that the moment Comcast succeeds in America, Deutsche Telekom and every other ISP on the planet will do the same thing. They’re just waiting to see if they can get away with it.

The internet used to be different. Not that long ago—twenty, thirty years—you could build something, put it online, and reach anyone who wanted to find it. No permission, no money, no negotiation. The barrier to entry was basically nothing. That mattered. That changed what was possible.

I’m not some starry-eyed optimist about how technology is supposed to liberate us. I know how capital works. But there was something genuinely new about the open internet, something that had never existed before in the same way, and turning it into a toll road feels like killing something on purpose just to make a few extra dollars.

The companies will win. They’ll win because they always do, and because most people don’t understand what’s being taken away, and because fighting it requires caring about something intangible. Cable companies understand profit. They’ll turn that understanding into policy, into infrastructure, into law. And then they’ll own the internet the way they own the pipes.

I’ve been online for two decades. I’ve seen it get better and slower and less weird and more corporate. This is just the final step, the moment where the thing that was supposed to be different becomes exactly like everything else.