Last April, Cisco Systems published a white paper explaining how the companies that own the phone lines and cables that connect homes and businesses to the Internet—the proverbial last mile—could use new routing technology to boost revenue. The technology would allow telephone and cable companies to establish priority lanes for high-bandwidth traffic like video, games, or voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls and then charge the Googles, Yahoos and Amazons of the world for access to these highway toll roads. Cisco’s paper predicted that this new strategy would allow broadband service providers to create new revenue-sharing business models with any company that sells content online.

The plan had only one problem: It was illegal.

The telecommunications laws that have governed the Internet since its inception require network owners to treat all traffic the same. The laws date to the 1930s and were put in place to force telephone companies to prevent a scenario where one company could refuse to carry calls placed by a rival’s customer. The Internet was designed with the same principle in mind. Routers are programmed to direct each packet of data on a best-effort basis, regardless of file type—video, voice, e-mail—or who the sender and recipient are. In the online world, this is called network, or net, neutrality, and last summer, it was the only thing standing between the telecommunications companies and a vast new revenue stream.

Since then, a Supreme Court ruling and a series of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decisions have eliminated this barrier, prompting Congress to rewrite the nation’s telecommunications laws. The new bill, which could be finalized as early as the summer, will in all likelihood officially eliminate net neutrality as the legal principle that governs the Internet. "If net neutrality goes away, it will fundamentally change everything about the Internet," says James Hilton, associate provost for Academic IT Works of the University of Michigan.

The impact of these changes on CIOs and their companies will be profound. The telecommunications and cable companies argue that allowing them to govern their networks as they see fit gives them a financial incentive to innovate at the core of the network, and develop new technologies that could guarantee things that CIOs want, like security and better quality of service. Proponents of net neutrality counter that the principle is the reason that the Internet and the corresponding online ecosystem have developed into the commercial and cultural phenomenon they are today. They argue that without a level playing field, telecommunications companies will force content providers—a broad category that includes anyone with a website—to pay up or see access to their content shifted to the slow lane.