You know, I have been thinking. How is lack of net neutrality going to affect things like page rank or online advertising? Let’s suppose I have a highly ranked site, and one day my host decides to stop paying AT&T the extortion money. This means that all the traffic to my site is not relayed via the Super Slow Pipe™.
Now if someone tries to reach my site on a high traffic day, may actually sit there and wait for long minutes. Allot of people may actually think my site is down if that performance continues. Consequently, they will take down the links to me from their websites. My page rank plummets!
What if one day googlebot can’t reach my website? I’m quite sure that most web spiders have some sort of timeout limit, after which they mark the site dead and move on. If I’m on the slow pipe (and believe me, most people will be) my load time might be too long for most spiders.
Same goes for advertising. Companies who use banners, or adsense may see a drop in the revenue from those sources. Websites that generated major revenue for them may one day be put on a slow pipe because of some deal between an ISP and a teleco. It doesn’t matter that google is paying off everyone. The site that carried the high earning adds may be to slow to use.
Lack of net neutrality will destroy the internet as we know it.