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 WASHINGTON — The principle that all Internet content should be treated equally as it flows through cables and pipes to consumers looks all but dead. 
 
 The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers. 
 
 The proposed changes would affect what is known as net neutrality — the idea that no providers of legal Internet content should face discrimination in providing offerings to consumers, and that users should have equal access to see any legal content they choose. 
 
 The proposal comes three months after a federal appeals court struck down, for the second time, agency rules intended to guarantee a free and open Internet. 
 
 Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, defended the agency’s plans late Wednesday, saying speculation that the F.C.C. was “gutting the open Internet rule” is “flat out wrong.” Rather, he said, the new rules will provide for net neutrality along the lines of the appeals court’s decision. 
 
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 Still, the regulations could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail. 
 
 The rules are also likely to eventually raise prices as the likes of Disney and Netflix pass on to customers whatever they pay for the speedier lanes, which are the digital equivalent of an uncongested car pool lane on a busy freeway. 
 
 Consumer groups immediately attacked the proposal, saying that not only would costs rise, but also that big, rich companies with the money to pay large fees to Internet service providers would be favored over small start-ups with innovative business models — stifling the birth of the next Facebook or Twitter. 
 
 “If it goes forward, this capitulation will represent Washington at its worst,” said Todd O’Boyle, program director of Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative. “Americans were promised, and deserve, an Internet that is free of toll roads, fast lanes and censorship — corporate or governmental.” 
 
 If the new rules deliver anything less, he added, “that would be a betrayal.” 
 
 Mr. Wheeler rebuffed such criticism. “There is no ‘turnaround in policy,’ ” he said in a statement. “The same rules will apply to all Internet content. As with the original open Internet rules, and consistent with the court’s decision, behavior that harms consumers or competition will not be permitted.” 
 
 Broadband companies have pushed for the right to build special lanes. Verizon said during appeals court arguments that if it could make those kinds of deals, it would. 
 
 Under the proposal, broadband providers would have to disclose how they treat all Internet traffic and on what terms they offer more rapid lanes, and would be required to act “in a commercially reasonable manner,” agency officials said. That standard would be fleshed out as the agency seeks public comment. 
 
 The proposed rules would also require Internet service providers to disclose whether in assigning faster lanes, they have favored their affiliated companies that provide content. That could have significant implications for Comcast, the nation’s largest provider of high-speed Internet service, because it owns NBCUniversal. 
 
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 Also, Comcast is asking for government permission to take over Time Warner Cable, the third-largest broadband provider, and opponents of the merger say that expanding its reach as a broadband company will give Comcast more incentive to favor its own content over that of unaffiliated programmers. 
 
 Mr. Wheeler has signaled for months that the federal appeals court decision striking down the earlier rules could force the commission to loosen its definitions of what constitutes an open Internet. 
 
 Those earlier rules effectively barred Internet service providers from making deals with services like Amazon or Netflix to allow those companies to pay to stream their products to viewers through a faster, express lane on the web. The court said that because the Internet is not considered a utility under federal law, it was not subject to that sort of regulation. 
 
 Opponents of the new proposed rules said they appeared to be full of holes, particularly in seeking to impose the “commercially reasonable” standard. 
 
 “The very essence of a ‘commercial reasonableness’ standard is discrimination,” Michael Weinberg, a vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, said in a statement. “And the core of net neutrality is nondiscrimination.” 
 
 Mr. Weinberg added that the commission and courts had acknowledged that it could be commercially reasonable for a broadband provider to charge a content company higher rates for access to consumers because that company’s service was competitively threatening. 
 
 “This standard allows Internet service providers to impose a new price of entry for innovation on the Internet,” he said. 
 
 Consumers can pay Internet service providers for a higher-speed Internet connection. But whatever speed they choose, under the new rules, they might get some content faster, depending on what the content provider has paid for. 
 
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 The fight over net neutrality has gone on for at least a decade, and is likely to continue at least until the F.C.C. settles on new rules. Each of the last two times the agency has written rules, one of the Internet service providers has taken it to court to have the rules invalidated. 
 
 If anything, lobbying over the details of the new net neutrality standard is likely to increase now that the federal court has provided a framework for the F.C.C. to work from as it fills in the specifics of its regulatory authority. 
 
 The proposed rules, drafted by Mr. Wheeler and his staff, will be circulated to the agency’s other four commissioners beginning on Thursday and will be released for public comment on May 15. They are likely to be put to a vote by the full commission by the end of the year. 
 
 News of the F.C.C. proposal was first reported online by The Wall Street Journal. ||||| Those comments were made with today's decision looming in the distance. "We are concerned about the two-sided market," pro-net-neutrality group Free Press told BuzzFeed at the time. Brent Skorup of the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University, representing the other side of the issue, said that Wheeler was "a little more industry friendly" than his predecessor. 
 
 This comes just a few weeks after the new chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the telecom industry, startled net neutrality advocates with this quote, given during a Q&A following his first formal public address: 
 
 Today, vital portions of the FCC's Open Internet rules were struck down in federal court. These rules, put in place in 2010, were designed to preserve what advocates call net neutrality — an assurance that internet providers can't favor one kind of traffic over another, or charge for access to certain parts of the internet. All traffic, according to the rules, was to be treated equally. Verizon challenged these rules, and mostly won. 
 
 It's an intoxicating pitch, and one you'll hear soon. The country's largest data providers are mulling it; their partners are figuring out how to make it work; the FCC, which is in charge of identifying downsides and regulating such things, just lost much of its ability to do so. Caught at the whirling nexus of theory and regulation and commerce, the average internet user's fate is uncertain. But today, a new and unexpected possibility has made itself clear: We may be entering the era of sponsored data — the era of an internet that we don't directly pay for, but that we also don't control. It's the old net neutrality nightmare, in other words, disguised as a gift. 
 
 What if you didn't have to pay for your data plan? What if the biggest data hogs on your phone — your music apps, your streaming video apps — didn't count toward your monthly limit? 
 
 For years, the net neutrality nightmare scenario was as follows: Carriers, such as Comcast, could charge different amounts for access to different tiers of the internet. The basic tier might include email and basic browsing; the next could include Facebook and Twitter; the final tier could include Netflix, YouTube, or Spotify. These tiers would be divided not by bandwidth or speed requirements, but by content type . The internet would become a club with various VIP sections, arbitrarily laid out to benefit internet providers. 
 
 The FCC chairman's own statement, while suggesting he is weighing an appeal, was cold comfort to his predecessor's allies. "I am committed to maintaining our networks as engines for economic growth, test beds for innovative services and products, and channels for all forms of speech protected by the First Amendment." 
 
 "Pretty much everybody in the industry pushed back very hard against it," he said. "There were a lot of people who came around to network neutrality — a reason why these rules were compromised, and had industry buy-in, was that a lot of people in the industry preferred these rules to reclassification." This is a potentially crippling defeat for net neutrality advocates. Trying to reclassify ISPs as utilities, essentially, would give anti-regulation opponents a much clearer position. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which opposes net neutrality, declared victory in a statement, saying the cause is "dead and buried." 
 
 By "treating broadband like a communications service," Free Press is suggesting categorizing internet providers as "common carriers," like phone companies, a possibility that, in comparison to preserving 2010's stricken FCC rules, is seen by insiders as a long shot. "From a legal perspective, it's easier," Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, told BuzzFeed. "What makes it difficult is the politics." 
 
 "This ruling means there is no one who can protect us from ISPs that block or discriminate against websites, applications or services," says a statement from the organization. Tell the FCC to start treating broadband like a communications service, and to restore its Net Neutrality rules." 
 
 This was the vision that propelled net neutrality into the public consciousness, and that led to its inclusion in Barack Obama's 2008 platform. Since then, the nightmare scenario has evolved, with the help of wireless providers. It became more subtle but no less insidious to net neutrality advocates; rather than charging users more for access to different parts of the internet, carriers would charge content providers to make sure their content worked well. The fears changed: Now it wasn't just users that were at risk, but upstart companies. Facebook might be able to afford preferential treatment. But what about the startup that wants to replace Facebook? This is the kind of behavior that Verizon, and others, won the right to engage in today, and it's more likely than ever to come to pass. "We're going to see more pushing of the envelope," Feld says. "Look, you know, Verizon said that if it weren't for these rules, we'd be out negotiating all kinds of deals for [preferential] access." In a statement today, Verizon assured customers that it wouldn't block content, but left open the possibility of preferential access on the service side. 
 
 In the last year, a third, equally insidious but even more subtle scenario has emerged, and today became a much realer possibility. On a less regulated internet, content providers — websites and services — might be able to pay for their users' data. Here's how AT&T describes its "Sponsored Data" plans: 
 
 Similar to 1-800 phone numbers or free shipping for internet commerce, AT&T's new 'Sponsored Data' service opens up new data use options for AT&T wireless customers and customer-friendly mobile broadband channels to businesses that choose to participate as sponsors… 
 
 
 
 With the new Sponsored Data service, data charges resulting from eligible uses will be billed directly to the sponsoring company; the customer simply enjoys their content via AT&T's wireless data network. Customers will see the service offered as AT&T Sponsored Data, and the usage will appear on their monthly invoice as Sponsored Data. 
 
 If you wanted to access the internet 15 years ago, you would sign up for a service plan with a company like AOL. For a fee — maybe $20, $30, $40 — you would get as much monthly access as you could use, more or less. Five years later, you would have made a similar arrangement with your cable or phone company for broadband access. Five years after that, you would still have a broadband connection, but you could also enter a new contract, this time with your cell phone company: For a monthly fee, you would get access to the entire internet from your smartphone. Your service might be tiered by speed or data allowances, but it has always been a pure pipe to the internet. How you use your bits has been up to you. 
 
 Sponsored data attacks the only major unappealing part of this long-standing tradition: its cost. It proposes the possibility that video sites, music sites, and social networking sites could pay for their users' access. It also poses a more fundamental question: If all your favorite services didn't count toward your phone's data plan, why would you bother having a data plan at all? 
 
 Recasting internet access as a subsidiary of internet services is not a familiar idea, but it's arriving in many forms. In fact, in the developing world, Facebook has been operating such a service for some time. Facebook for Every Phone, through deals with carriers, provides access to basic Facebook services and apps for free. Facebook isn't just subsidizing some internet experiences, here — it's subsidizing users' very first internet experiences. "It's like the early days of broadcast television," Feld says, "where you would pay affiliates to carry your programming." 
 
 The appeal of such an arrangement to a regular customer is obvious: you would pay less for your data, at least directly. "Consumers don't like it when you take things away," says Feld, so "carriers need to be more subtle than that." They will do so primarily, he says, by creating "artificial scarcity" — data caps — and requiring customers, or now, internet companies, to buy their way around them. 
 
 The appeal of the latter arrangement to the internet's largest companies is even more obvious: It would give them unprecedented control over the internet and its users. If, in this future, you're choosing between two streaming music services, and one of them pays for your data, there's a very good chance you're going to pick that one. 
 
 But which one would be able to do that? The largest one, the incumbent. "This will have profound implications for the internet's ecology," says Feld. Worse, he worries, companies that were willing to fight for net neutrality in the old days won't be such strong allies in 2014, now that they are the largest incumbents on the internet. "They're big, and they can negotiate," he says. "Once you're on the inside, exclusion doesn't seem like such a bad thing. If you're Google, maybe getting access for YouTube is what you want, rather than what you want to fight." ||||| The fight for net neutrality, the basic principle that all data on the internet should be treated equally, isn't important only because it ensures users are able to stream the latest episode of Game of Thrones via HBO GO just as easily as they can watch the latest Pewdiepie video on YouTube. For companies on the fringe of mainstream media, like the adult entertainment industry, the end of an open internet could have dire consequences for their businesses and free speech. 
 
 "Without [net neutrality], the cable and wireless companies that control internet access will have unfair power to pick winners and losers in the market," Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, told Motherboard last week, when Pornhub announced it will join over 60 companies in staging a day of action ahead of the first deadline for comments on the FCC's proposal to roll back net neutrality protections. 
 
 Other adult entertainment sites like Kink.com, ManyVids, and xHamster (the third largest porn site), have announced their support, so we got in touch to find out why net neutrality was important to the online porn business in particular. 
 
 When you slow sections of the internet, you're telling people that some ideas and sexualities and identities are second-class, and you bring that shame back. The internet becomes The Big Vanilla." 
 
 "Fifteen years ago, it was really difficult to find quality fetish content," Mike Stabile, a spokesperson for the fetish-oriented website Kink.com, said in a written statement. "We were severely restricted by distributors, by billing companies, and by limitations in internet speeds. The quickening of the internet has meant that many more people have access, and can reach our content, and thus stop feeling loneliness and shame. When you slow sections of the internet, you're telling people that some ideas and sexualities and identities are second-class, and you bring that shame back. The internet becomes The Big Vanilla." 
 
 Stabile said that even as the largest producer of BDSM entertainment in the world, Kink doesn't have the revenue to compete with companies like YouTube and Netflix for bandwidth, and that he doubts internet service providers, or ISPs will prioritize traffic from Kink.com. This doesn't mean that adult content will be limited entirely by losing net neutrality, only that it would shift away from video to photos and GIFs. 
 
 Alex Hawkins, a spokesperson for xHamster, said that as a user upload-driven company, where most of its content is from regular people posting their own sexual experiences, throttling internet speeds would have a "devastating effect" on users who are trying to upload as a way to connect with others. 
 
 "As an international company, we see every day how restrictive governments use regulatory tools, like traffic throttling, to limit access to not only porn but political speech," Hawkins told me. "What people sometimes miss, especially in the United States and Western Europe, is that sexual speech is political speech. The same governments that severely restrict adult content are also the ones that limit sexual expression, LGBTQ rights, women's rights and access to different ideas. 
 
 "Even in the US," he added, "the same politicians who fight against adult content are the ones advocating for a limited, heteronormative version of sexuality. We make them nervous." 
 
 Hawkins said that xHamster has millions of users in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, where adult content is almost entirely banned. Where there's a will, porn finds a way, but for every person who finds a workaround, thousands more don't. 
 
 "Net neutrality is the first step in making the US market align with more conservative regimes across the world, not just in terms of porn, but in ideas about sexuality," Hawkins said. 
 
 At adult clip site ManyVids, CEO Sed Dehan and CTO Anthony Moretti say it's a matter of enabling content creators to become successful, and giving them the freedom to push boundaries and break taboos. Rolling back net neutrality protections, per the FCC's proposal, would that user empowerment, and put the wide range of fetishes and tastes in the hands of service providers to decide what is and is not worthy. 
 
 "People who pursue strange fetishes already feel that they must hide it, and that it's out of the norm," Dehan and Moretti said in a joint statement. "We want to create a space that welcomes those individuals and make them understand that they aren't alone. That there are others who celebrate that with them." 
 
 But that would be harder for online porn companies like ManyVids to do should all data not be treated equally on the internet, Dehan and Moretti added. "The adult industry would become very vanilla and boring without net neutrality." 
 
 Update: This story has been updated to note the size of xHamster relative to PornHub. ||||| If you like how cable television works, you're going to love how a court decision Tuesday could change the Internet. 
 
 Thanks to the ruling, broadband providers can now exert a lot more control over what sites you visit on the Internet and what services you can access. The decision would allow Comcast, for example, to bar its Internet subscribers from seeing videos from Netflix (NFLX) or from using Vonage's Internet phone service. 
 
 In a decision that could reshape consumers' access to entertainment, news and other online content, a federal appeals court Tuesday set aside Federal Communications Commission rules designed to ensure that transmission of all Internet content be treated equally. (Paul Sakuma/AP file photo) 
 
 Made by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the decision overturned rules put in place by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010 that barred wired Internet providers from blocking access to particular sites or services, and generally required them to treat all Internet traffic equally. 
 
 While the court's ruling will worry and anger advocates of an open Internet, it's federal regulators, not the judges, who are to blame. Their subservience to the big telecommunications companies and timidity in writing the rules governing Internet traffic led directly to the court's decision. 
 
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 One thing that has made the Internet distinct from pay television services is the role of the service provider. With pay TV, the cable or satellite company determines what channels you can watch, which often depends on what kind of financial deals the providers can strike with the channel operators. As subscribers have seen, disputes over who should pay what can lead to channels or programs going off the air. 
 
 Since its founding, the Internet has operated differently, at least in this country. The understanding -- underwritten by certain legal precedents -- was that end users should be able to connect to any site or service attached to the network, not just those that their broadband service provider approves. There's also long been a generally understood principle that all Internet providers should treat the bits that pass through their networks more or less the same; that you should be able to access video from Netflix as easily as video from Comcast -- or even video on your Aunt Edna's website. 
 
 But in recent years, this principle, dubbed "network neutrality," has been challenged by the service providers. Most notoriously, Comcast inhibited some of its customers from using file-sharing applications by deliberately slowing access to those services. 
 
 In response to those challenges, the FCC, which regulates telecommunications services in this country, put in place its Open Internet rules, which sought to explicitly codify the principles of net neutrality. 
 
 But the FCC made what turns out to have been a big mistake. As the appeals court noted in its ruling, the Open Internet rules essentially require the broadband providers to act as "common carriers," a class of highly regulated companies that are required to treat all customers the same. Unfortunately, the FCC determined long ago that the providers weren't common carriers. 
 
 Under the Bush administration, the FCC was determined to deregulate the telecommunications industry. As part of that effort, it reversed its previous stance and removed Internet providers from common carrier regulations. But even as it deregulated the industry, the FCC sought to maintain the notion of net neutrality. Unfortunately, by determining that the broadband providers weren't common carriers, it basically took away from itself the legal authority to enforce that notion. That's what the court ruled Tuesday: that the FCC can't impose common carrier rules on companies that aren't common carriers. 
 
 There are, of course, answers to this problem. One is that the U.S. Supreme Court could overrule the appeals court if the FCC appeals the ruling. The other is that the FCC could reclassify the broadband providers and give itself back the authority to regulate them. 
 
 But you can bet it will face a lot of resistance to doing so. Back when the agency was debating the Open Internet rules, consumer groups urged the FCC to ground those rules in the finding that the broadband providers are in fact common carriers. But that proposal met considerable resistance from the big telecommunications companies and from those companies' champions in Congress. The final rules were an attempt by the agency to appease both sides. 
 
 The agency may find the gumption this time to tick off the telecommunications giants by re-regulating them. But I wouldn't bet on it. I think it's much more likely that the agency, which is now headed by a former industry lobbyist, will capitulate. 
 
 So enjoy accessing your Internet videos from Netflix and Aunt Edna. They may not be so easy to watch in the future -- if you can watch them at all. 
 
 Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews.com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.
– Yesterday was the day net neutrality died, with a court ruling that Internet service providers aren't bound by FCC non-discrimination rules—so they can prioritize some traffic over others. The decision may mean major changes for the everyday user, and today, media sites are offering the details. Among their warnings: The Wall Street Journal reports that the decision could have a huge impact on sites like Netflix and YouTube, whose video services hog a lot of bandwidth (they account for 32% and 19% of peak web traffic, respectively). If ISPs start making Netflix, for instance, pay a usage fee to maintain speedy content delivery, that cost could make a serious dent in its profits—or trickle down to consumers. ISPs could charge sites big fees in exchange for faster content delivery, potentially giving giants who can pay, like Amazon, a big leg up over independent retailers—not to mention other small businesses, the Huffington Post notes. Providers might even go so far as to prioritize traffic to partner sites—Time Warner might push CNN, for example. Another anti-competitive fear, via BuzzFeed: Big companies might start paying your data fees for the use of their sites. That might sound good—free data?—but it would mean that companies with the ability to pay would have a major advantage over start-ups in winning users. As BuzzFeed points out, "If, in this future, you're choosing between two streaming music services, and one of them pays for your data, there's a very good chance you’re going to pick that one." Beyond concerns over fees, there are worries that providers could block certain websites completely: Comcast users could theoretically end up with no access to, say, Netflix or Vonage, writes Troy Wolverton in the San Jose Mercury News. But net neutrality, in some form, may live to see another day, the Journal notes, reporting that the ruling "left open the door for the FCC to craft rules in a different form that might accomplish its earlier intentions."