The FCC has been a problem for a while:

FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.
...
By siding with telcos who want to be able to offer adequate bandwidth to sites that pay up, and to limit bandwidth to sites that don't, he'll help kill off new sites that can't afford to fork over the money.

That could help end Internet and network innovation, and we simply can't afford that.

This is really what it comes down to. Established players want to consolidate the internet. Sometimes -- as in the case of Billionaire Basketball Team Owner Marc Cuban -- by pedalling fantasy applications such as "home diagnostic tools for senior citizens." The reality is, we're highly unlikely to see those types of applications anytime soon in a consolodated marketplace.

The rapid pace of innovation online really comes from it being an open end-to-end system. Lock in a tiered structure that favors those who can pay, and watch the net turn into a mechanism for corporat content providers to pipe crap to your Xbox. The internet becomes TV with chat rooms.

That's one possible future. It's not as dark as the 1984 internet-as-panopticon possibility that's still out there, but it's not what I want to happen. The new kids on the block (google, yahoo, microsoft, et al) will fight this, but it's going to be a close call.

I tend to think the "inter" part of the internet might be another way out -- other nations or regions (or even municipalities) could get it right and outperform the fatbacks. Hopefully it won't come to that.