Oh no, oh no, oh no. It is the beginning of the end. Ushering in the new era of fast lanes, and horribly controlled Internet. The free and open Internet is no more. Now, the likelihood of this being set in stone is kind of high, especially seeing as the main FCC chairman, Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for cable industry.

Source (for more information):http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/15/fcc-net-neutrality_n_5331278.html.

Enjoy your Internet properly while you still can. Also all those petitions that were signed that got millions of signatures? Guess what? They meant nothing. Sigh. Just thought I should get this information out to people. Peace.

Edit: I should probably point out that this is not a final ruling, just an initial one, and then they are going to allow "opinions" from the people (side-note: they do not like the ruling, the FCC is just acting in favor of the ISP's). The odds of it going unchanged are very likely though.

sop281 : I know this may sound very stupid but what is Net Neutrality? From what I understand it's being watched when we're on the Internet or something like that. Is that correct?

juuldude : It would be pretty difficult to go into great detail, but here's a short rundown of it: The Internet is currently considered "open". Internet Service Providers cannot cause slowdowns on specific websites, nor can they give special privileges to websites that pay them more. Once net neutrality ends, companies, such as Comcast and Verizon, can charge customers (website owners) extra so that they can get speed boosts on their sites, and ultimately slowdown other sites. The cost will also essentially set upon the customers to bear, as the companies will not feel like shelling out extra cash for free. So, in the end, it would end up allowing Internet Service Providers to cause consumers great problems.

Here is an article explaining it in more detail: Net Neutrality. 

sop281 : Wow, that's pretty confusing stuff but I understood some of it. I hope this won't happen because it would be terrible to wait a hour for a Vizzed page to load. Or Vizzed even might have to pay, ruining great features of the site. 

LOL, I find it humorous and slightly stupid that company's are willing to pay money to have users access their site faster than competitors or have their company's site accessed slower by users. To me the whole idea is stupid for this reason alone, this is the internet where there aren't to many limits or restrictions to what you can't do hacking wise, I guarantee if they put this into effect and company's start to do this some hacker or group of hackers will find away to boost the speed of the site they want to access faster and ultimately about a week or so after company's do this practice, I'm almost certain the company's paying to run their site faster and slow down others will be hacked, think about people hack sites for no given reason all the time, if that practice becomes common use then your giving hackers a reason to hack your site and crash it because your preventing a site they want to get on from loading. Bottom line is someone will find a way to beat this system, someone always does. 

This is the beauty of free market economies.  If a company starts slowing internet load times, someone else comes along and provides that service at a faster rate for the same price.  People switch to the new provider, they're happy, and the old provider ceases to exist.

Only so many shenanigans can happen before people stop investing and paying a particular company.  You select what happens with your money and they do what you want.  If you don't like them, switch.

warmaker : This is not really as great as you are making it out to be. In many cases, people only have access to one Internet provider, nothing else. When that company starts making bad policies (oh wait, too late, they all already have), they have no choice. They have to stick with that really crappy Internet Service Provider. There is no other option. This will only make it worse for them. People will have to pay more for a crappier Internet service. This also gives providers the ability to block users access from specific websites, not just cause them slowdowns. Comcast had a history with blocking people access to uTorrent or Bittorent, I cannot remember which, and were eventually stopped. With the new legislation, however, they will be able to do just that, forever. This is actually extremely horrible. I see no upside, except to the ISP's, and the rich. Everybody else is shafted.