In return for bringing the next-generation Internet online, the telecommunications companies want to be allowed to do away with “net neutrality” — that is, to be allowed to charge content-providers a premium to take advantage of the faster speeds. Such a two-tiered arrangement would relegate nonprofits, community-based sites, lone bloggers, and the like to the slow lane — and, eventually, to oblivion, as users would come to see them as too retro and too frustratingly slow to bother with.

The Internet is the single greatest threat to corporate dominance of the media since the industrial model was established a century and a half ago. It would be naïve to think that these corporations wouldn’t fight back. In so doing, they are embracing (as Neil Postman predicted they would) not the strategy of Orwell’s 1984, but of Huxley’s Brave New World. By ensuring that all the latest, richest, coolest content is on the new, high-speed, corporate-controlled Net, they’ll deprive the independent sites of the oxygen they need to survive. And we’ll be so overloaded with entertainment that we won’t care.

“That the self-serving interests of a few giants could end up threatening the potential of the Internet to serve democracy and fair competition illustrates the corruption and intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. communications policymaking,” Chester writes. The election of a Democratic Congress last November, and the ascendance of pro-consumer congressmen like US Representative Edward Markey to key regulatory positions, may help stave off the telecoms — for now. But these behemoths, after all, donate to members of both parties. A leading proponent of the campaign to do away with net neutrality is former Bill Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry. Clearly, the assault on the open Internet is a bipartisan proposition.

The fight to ensure net neutrality is the first great media regulatory war of the 21st century. The outcome will determine whether the Berlin Wall is really falling down — or if, instead, this is a Prague spring, a brief moment of freedom that will inevitably be followed by a new wave of corporate media dominance.

Dan Kennedy, a Phoenix contributing writer, teaches journalism at Northeastern University and blogs at Media Nation (medianation.blogspot.com). He can be reached at dkennedy@thephoenix.com .