As the FCC sleazes its way towards a world of cable company fuckery, Bittorrent's Join the Fastlane provides a preview of a world where your ability to get reliable access to parts of the Internet you love is a function of those sites' willingness to bribe your ISP for "premium" carriage.
It's telling how much these arrangements resemble the net in territories where telco fuckery is the order of the day. For example, in India, ISPs impose strict bandwidth caps that make network gaming too expensive for many players. But one company, Indiagames, has negotiated exclusive deals with all the major ISPs to make their games exempt from the caps, and they offer a string of B-grade games lead the Indian charts, despite being also-rans practically everywhere else.
The lesson's simple: if you let the carriers pick the winners, the winners will be the ones with the biggest bribes, not the best products.
(via Techdirt!)
