3. What would be the impact on individual users, businesses, and government if Internet providers switched to a tiered service model for transmission over land lines as well as wireless? What kind of Internet user are you? Do you primarily use the Net to do a little e-mail and online banking? Or are you online all day, watching YouTube videos, downloading music files, or playing online games? Do you use your iPhone to stream TV shows and movies on a regular basis? If you’re a power Internet or smartphone user, you are consuming a great deal of bandwidth. Could hundreds of millions of people like you start to slow the Internet down?

Video streaming on Netflix accounts for 32 percent of all bandwidth use in the United States, and Google’s YouTube for 19 percent of Web traffic at peak hours. If user demand overwhelms network capacity, the Internet might not come to a screeching halt, but users could face sluggish download speeds and video transmission. Heavy use of iPhones in urban areas such as New York and San Francisco has already degraded service on the AT&T wireless network. AT&T reported that 3 percent of its subscriber base accounted for 40 percent of its data traffic.