Alright, kids. Put down your beer bongs and get off myspace. The intertron is under siege.

There's currently a battle in Congress about "Net Neutrality". In simple terms: the right for internet providers to limit or outright block your access to specific parts of the internet. For example, AOL could block you from seeing TPM or at least made it load very very slowly. On the other hand some bigwig forum bristling with ads could pay AOL so they get the speedy load times. TPM would have to pay AOL or piss off.

That's not a likely scenario, but you might be in a situation where you have to use Yahoo because Google didn't pay Verizon enough money. Or maybe your precious myspace is loading like crap because some other site is paying more.

The bottom line is: America currently lacks the competition in ISPs for Net Neutrality to stop existing. If we had a more diverse market, this wouldn't be a huge deal, as a large number of competitors would mean constant battles over whom offers the most acces until we're back at Net Neutrality again. But there are many areas in the US where you either go with company A or it's back to dial-up.

Scary thing is, the companies are winning. The House voted down a bill to protect Net Neutrality.

Uh-oh.