Now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under chairman Ajit Pai has officially repealed net neutrality rules that have been in effect since 2015, the question becomes: Will the web really change?

The vote took place on Thursday, but nothing will change immediately, according to both advocates and opponents of the rules. That may be all they agree on, though. There’s a good reason that net neutrality has been one of the most contentious digital issues of 2017. The two camps predict very different futures for the internet.

…

“The easiest way for ISPs to enact tolls on the internet is simply by charging online services at the point where those sites or services enter a broadband ISP’s network,” Ryan Singel, Media and Strategy Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, says.

…

Paid prioritization and interconnection deals sound similar, but there’s a key difference, Singel says. “Think of interconnection like the admission fee to Disneyland. Pay or you don’t get to play at all. Paid priority deals, where companies can pay for fast lanes, are more like Disney express passes that get you to the head of the line.”

…

In 2013, in the course of a lawsuit over an earlier FCC attempt to impose net neutrality rules, “Verizon told a federal court that as an ‘information service’ it had the right to charge any website any amount of money it liked—reasonable or not—and block that service if it did not pay up,” Stanford Law’s Ryan Singel says.

In effect, an ISP could withhold access to a website by citing an astronomical fee “even while promising no blocking to its subscribers,” Singel says.