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It’s late on a Monday night. You have homework to do, but instead, you’re downloading some Rage Against the Machine, watching the end of the UCLA-Gonzaga game again on YouTube, and perusing the message boards at BigCorporationsSuck.org. Suddenly, to your mystification, the download comes to a crawl, the basketball stream cuts out, and the message board won’t load.

It must be the Internet connection, you think – it’s too slow. You decide to search for a new broadband provider on Google, but the search results for “cheaper broadband provider” won’t load. Curious, you search for “reasons AT&T is awesome.” Before you can even blink, you are inundated with 450 million search results. Now would be a good time to post on that message board, but, of course, the page still won’t load.

Welcome to the Internet of the future. Broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast, currently laying a nationwide network of blindingly fast Internet wires, will soon be able to segregate the information flowing through those wires into “fast lanes” and “slow lanes.” Information in the fast lane will travel at broadband-quality speed, while information in the slow lane may travel at dial-up speed or worse – and the only way to ensure that your information will be in the fast lane will be to pay those broadband providers a premium fee.

Internet providers don’t currently divide the content that they transmit to consumers, but Silicon Valley has been developing ways for providers to separate different forms of content in order to deliver it at different speeds. This is ostensibly in order to be able to ensure that high-bandwidth content like streaming video is not interrupted by transmission of less-important content, but telecom companies have seized on it in order to make more money.

Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, explained his company’s thorough reasoning for this in November’s Business Week magazine: “Now what (Internet companies like Google) would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that. ... Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?” In order to make his point more delicately, he elaborated: “For a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes (for) free is nuts!”

But those who want all bits of information flowing over the Internet to be treated the same, as is currently the case, have adopted the phrase “net neutrality.” Libertarian groups, consumer groups and large companies that rely on the Internet for their business (such as Google and Amazon) contend that forcing content providers to pay to use the fast lane will choke the Internet of the grassroots innovation that has made it the most revolutionary communication device in history.

Companies like Google will be inconvenienced by having to pay to use the fast lanes (or more than inconvenienced, if telecom companies decide to segregate based on content and not on just who has paid and who hasn’t), but popular sites such as YouTube, which require fast connections in order to stream videos, could be put out of business if they don’t have the money to pay Whitacre for the privilege of using his pipes.

Last week, Democrats attempted to attach an amendment to a House communications bill that would have prevented AT&T and other telecoms from charging premium fees for premium broadband speed, but the amendment was voted down in the Republican-led Energy & Commerce Committee – ensuring that, whatever else happens, you’ll always be able to get your Internet fix of committee chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas, at lightning speed. (“Oh, look, committee chairman Joe Barton listed the Second Amendment as his favorite! He’s so dreamy!”)

Net-neutrality advocates hope to take the amendment to other committees in the House and Senate in hopes of attaching it to another bill, but it’s unclear if this will work – this Congress has been seen as strongly in favor of deregulation across the board.

Segregating content – allowing faster transmission of high-importance data and prioritizing data that takes up more bandwidth – could be a good idea. You would most likely prefer that streaming UCLA-Gonzaga video to run uninterrupted even if it meant a song downloaded more slowly.

But using that technology to penalize companies that can’t or don’t want to pay to use broadband wires – especially since telecom companies already make plenty of money from the consumers who have to pay for the product – could choke the innovation out of the past decade’s most innovative force. Sure, the Internet is revolutionary because we can buy books from Amazon, but it’s even more revolutionary because we can blog, use Facebook, or find news we can’t find on television.

All these things will be jeopardized if the providers of those services have to pay to get their ideas to us. Whitacre is trying to turn the Internet into his personal front lawn (“Hey! You kids get away from my pipes! Stop looking at my pipes! Stop breathing on my pipes! You kids get away from my pipes or I’m calling the police!”), but it should be more like a community park, available for anyone who wants to use it. Unfortunately, unless someone is able to come up with a flaming poop-bag of reasons to make Whitacre and other telecom executives see the light, we’ll all end up being left out on the sidewalk.