(Daily Beast) — It’s hard to overstate either how important FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statement was last week, or how improbable. The chairman’s proposal, which will be voted on by the full five-member commission on February 26, bans broadband companies from discriminating between different content providers based on who can pay. If the FCC supports it, it protects the Internet from a world in which there are slow lanes for poor content providers and fast lanes for rich ones. At the most basic level, it keeps Comcast and Time Warner from becoming the dictators of what we see, read, and write about.
And it’s a political miracle.
A year ago, this was called “the nuclear option.” It was seen as so toxic to big cable, and so radical, that it was used by the pragmatists in Washington simply as a tool to push for something greater.
