Washington (DC) - In as little as two years' time, your broadband Internet service could change, perhaps dramatically, as you may be asked - some would say forced - to make new choices. Depending on those choices, some of the very fabric of the Internet itself could be redefined as well, depending on the outcome of a debate in the US Congress, which entered a new phase on 30 March.

"The more people learn about this, the more they'll understand we're heading toward a system of informational apartheid," Rep. Edward J. Markey (D - Mass.) told The San Francisco Chronicle yesterday.

Lawmakers on both sides of the debate claim to have consumers' interests at heart - innovated services, expanded reach, and lower rates. But the process that lawmakers entered into last week amounts to nothing less than open-heart surgery for the nation's Internet service, with the argument centering around how best to proceed, with the outcome of the procedure entirely uncertain, and with the fate of a multi-billion-dollar annual industry resting in their hands.

The event which triggered this debate last week was the formal trashing of bipartisan telecom reform legislation in the House of Representatives, and the introduction of a replacement bill by Joe Barton (R - Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Under the system that the new bill proposes, cable broadband Internet service providers - those whose services are used by consumers through cable modems - could obtain national franchises through the Federal Communications Commission, that would apply to any locality anywhere in the nation. Today, cable service providers (CATV) obtain local licenses to provide service to individual areas and municipalities - in some states, as small as square blocks and neighborhoods, though other states such as Texas have permitted statewide licenses. These state and local governments would be forced to recognize these national franchisees as their competitors, and make way for them in current cable lines regulated by municipalities.

Last week, TG Daily explored one possible outcome of this legislation: the ironic re-creation of a service tier for local- and long-distance "land line" voice communication nationwide, not seen since the 1984 breakup of the Bell System. But there's another possible outcome of the very same legislation, which analysts and others have made clear to us, and which could come about depending on the outcome of committee markup sessions this week, and in the weeks of debate to come: Current broadband service providers, such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox Communications, with lesser investments in existing land lines, could be compelled to partner with Internet content companies such as Google and Yahoo, to provide co-branded service akin to the AT&T Yahoo DSL service available today in many areas. To make such partnerships rewarding to the content companies, CATV providers could enable "fast lane" access - otherwise known as "preferential treatment" - to Web sites and services offered by those content providers.

"The major shortcoming of the measure," said Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Virginia), an opponent of the Barton bill, in his opening remarks to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet last week, "is the green light that it gives to a practice that I fear will undermine the openness and the accessibility of the Internet - qualities that have made the Internet a major driving force in the nation's economy. Some last-mile broadband providers have announced an intention to create a fast lane into the home for content providers who will provide them for fast-lane access, and a slow lane for everyone else. In addition to limiting customer choice, I'm deeply concerned that this two-lane plan will have a dramatic adverse effect on innovation." Small content providers, such as Google once was, would not be able to pay the fees to service providers that would enable them to compete with fast-lane providers on the same level, Rep. Boucher argued.

What could make matters worse, Boucher continued, is if fast-lane measures are passed through early legislation, creating a business model that, once established, would be too difficult for successive legislation to undo. "Experience teaches us that, when companies begin deriving revenues from a business model," he remarked, "it is exceedingly difficult to outlaw that model. This is not something we're going to be able to take back. If we do nothing today, and five years from now, innovation has suffered, and last-mile providers are deriving revenues from this new business plan of a two-lane Internet - a fast lane and a slow lane - it's going to be too late to make repairs."

Deepa Iyer, an IPTV analyst with Parks Associates who followed last week's proceedings, believes in a kind of trickle-down theory with respect to costs. If content providers end up paying service providers for fast-lane access, she told TG Daily, those costs have to be distributed somewhere...and there's generally one group who qualifies as the "somewhere." While on the one hand, she said, the Barton bill creates "equal opportunity for the cable operators and the telecom operators to compete [head-on] for all these advanced services," she said, "on the other hand, I think by creating these tiered-type Internets, it's the consumer who is going to lose in the end. They have to pay for all the premiums that would be charged by these incumbents to all these small players who want to offer services over the Internet."

There's a completely different school of thought which says that large Internet content providers could conceivably subsidize broadband Internet, and in so doing, lower rates for consumers, the way cell phone carriers reduce the cost of phones for their customers. Already, the existing CATV providers - called the incumbents - continue to lose money, by continuing to charge customers far less than what they've actually invested in installing and rolling out lines, services, and technologies. But they made these investments happily, believing that the current locally-oriented franchising system would ensure, in most cases, limited monopoly coverage areas for cable broadband service. So in most of the country, each incumbent CATV broadband provider competes with DSL and satellite, both of whose technologies are generally perceived as slower.