The new world... wide web

So some disturbing changed in the world of the interweb have come up lately. Most notably the telcos becoming a government domestic spy agency while concurrently becoming a monopoly again AND lobbying old farts to give them unprecedented power to levy taxes on the internet to whoever they want to (namely successful companies who they want to cut in on). The problem here is that I do not foresee these big companies giving in to this extortion.

Here is what will actually happen:

AT&T will tell Google, "Give us a lot of your money or we will make you slow."

Google: "Okay, maybe a little."

AT&T: "Neat! I bet we could do that to everyone! medicalrecords-online.com, money please."

Medicalrecords-onine.com: "We can't."

AT&T: "Okay, you are slow. Everyone else, pay up."

Google: "AT&T, while you were being dicks, we decided to build our own internet. Since we do no evil and you are pure evil, goodbye and good luck."

Medicalrecords-onine.com: "Google, can we be on your internet?"

Everyone else in the world: "Google, how do I use your internet?"

Google: "It's free to you, just like everything else we do."

Everyone in the world: "Bye AT&T, you money grubbing whores."

Now what happens after this point? All of the companies and countries who wanted to be separate from the conglomerated internet will see this as the obvious opportunity. We will have a fragmentation of the internet with separated governments like China and separated communication networks based on updated VoIP technologies. Smart browser developers like Firefox will make their browsers so they seamlessly access all of these networks and the legislation and administration is now hopelessly out of reach of government legislation.

Then civil war breaks out, Bush is assassinated rather than allowed a fourth term of presidency and everyone who kept their guns despite the domestic disarmament laws are very happy they did.