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A hell of a lot of my time is spent on solitary online research; losing that would be extremely tough to weather.
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Are you sure, because at least some of that time seems to be spent looking up articles to scare yourself!
Still, it doesn't matter what the FCC does. They are nearly irrelevant. There are forces more powerful than government in this world.
You may look at the music industry for an example. They tried everything they could to control how bits and bytes were shipped around so that they could maintain their business model. They even got the feds to agree to several approaches such as the
DMCA.
But the Internet laughed and laughed, and stepped all over everything they came up with, until finally now the music industry has learned that it can't control shit, and is trying to do what it can to work with the tides.
WE are in charge here. Not the big government, not the powerful moneyed industries.
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The argument over whether you will be able to get small amounts of bandwidth to research things, is OVER. We are now arguing over whether you will be able to get the amount needed to stream a Hollywood movie on demand.
Size of a Standard Def movie = 2000000000 bytes
Size of a High Def movie = 5000000000 bytes
Size of a book = 1000000 bytes
The bandwidth for a single HD movie can fit 5,000 books.
The size of a single standard HD movie is larger than the size of the entire Cellar: 15 years of words, content and code. That's right, one single movie is enough bandwidth to keep you reading an hour a day for 15 years.
The bandwidth for a single, rather poor cable connection is enough to transfer 7000 books per hour.
And that, my friends, is why tw's arguments about this include things from 1997. Partly because his brain stopped adding new things that year, but mostly because that was the last year we argued about whether the scarce bandwidth available could cheaply transfer the books you wanted.