To function properly, there have to be standards. This would be a violation of standards.

What is being proposed has nothing to do with free markets and competition. They want to distort the market and block competition.

When you type in HTTP, HTML, and many other related acronyms you are using trademarks that belong to W3C, not a telco or cable company.

Most such web-related acronyms are “generic” terms, not trademarks per se; as best I can tell (IANAL), this means W3C registered them not to enforce their ownership of them (wouldn’t that be a laugh) but to prevent someone else from trademarking them.

(End of quibble.)

The balkanization of the internet (not to be confused with Balkinization, an excellent constitutional law blog, by Jack Balkin) would soon render it impossible to do business there, at least for enterprises that didn’t have the money to pay off the bigtime carriers. By contrast, the telephone system is highly balkanized, but ultimately, POTS either works or it doesn’t; AFAIK there’s no “first class” and “coach” for plain old telephone service. The internet is a different matter. Some of my clients over the last few years, especially near the beginning of commercial use of the web, would have been hammered if the biggies had been allowed to prefer their own content when acting as carriers. And that’s doubtless what they intend now: small startups with not a lot of capital to throw around simply won’t make a go of it. How lovely for AOL etc.

As with doctors who own the medical testing labs in the same building, I don’t rightly approve of allowing the same company to be both carrier and content provider. All the people who repeatedly bleat “free market!” should contemplate how little actual competition would result from such a change. “De facto monopoly” would be a better description of the result.