Originally Posted by Brad Mitchell

What it means is that consumer and mobile providers like Comcast Cable, Cox, Verizon and ATT can congest or rate limit connections to global networks and content providers that don't themselves directly connect to consumers.. which none do. This will effectively challenge hosts, CDNs and global networks like Level3, Teliasonera, Cogent, GTT, NTT and the like to deliver high throughputs via their direct and indirect peerings or transit to the consumer ISPs. Currently, the global fiber networks connect to these ISPs directly and indirectly through combinations of free peering, paid peering and transit. It means that a company like Comcast can decide to rate limit access to specific content networks and will very likely result in higher charges to consumers that resemble upsells for faster access to specific networks. It also means that Comcast can turn to the content hosts, global transit networks, and CDNs and tell them that they need to buy access to their network instead of today where they are reasonably required to expand free peering to meet demand. This is an over-simplified explanation but should be at least a little bit helpful. It possibly means that the price of bandwidth could go up for consumers and businesses with consumer phone and ISPs being able to discriminate on both sides of their fiber to determine access prices and related throughput.

Brad