Earlier this month, I had an evening meeting in D.C. followed by a class to teach in Boston the following day. I had just one choice for a flight: the US Airways 9 p.m. shuttle. Attempting to board right after the first-class passengers, I was blocked by the gate agent, who pointed to the viola on my back: "You'll have to gate check that. That's a musical instrument, and we don't allow those on board."

In case you don't play a stringed instrument, take it from me: You can't check them. They're fragile and easily wrecked by very low or very high temperatures. Musicians had such a hard time with the arbitrary conduct of airlines that they persuaded Congress in 2012 to require airlines to accommodate musical instruments if they fit in the overhead bin.

[#contributor: /contributors/5932739a2a990b06268aab71]|||Susan Crawford is the (Visiting) Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard's Kennedy School and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. She was a board member of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2005-2008, and served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy in 2009.|||

There was plenty of room in the overhead compartments at that moment. Then came the moment of truth: I asked whether the case could travel in the closet at the front of the plane. "No," she said. "That's just for first class."

Look, we all have travel stories. I just happened to confront a particularly crazy gate agent. (My colleague who managed to get on the plane that night told me that the agent later actually boarded the plane to force a passenger to remove from the overhead bin a bag that she didn't feel should be there. "It was surreal; sort of how a B-movie would make Aeroflot customer service seem," he said.)

After a night at a friend's house in D.C., I went back to the airport to catch a morning flight. Same airline, same gate, different gate agent: No problem. I caught up with my luggage at Logan and taught my class.

Al Jazeera can topple authoritarian regimes but cannot get carried by Comcast. Why is that? Because Comcast and the other major cable distributors get to decide who wins and who loses, and under what terms.Just imagine trying to run a business that is utterly dependent on a single delivery network — a gatekeeper — that can make up the rules on the fly and knows you have nowhere else to go. To get the predictability you need to stay solvent, you'll be told to pay a "first class" premium to reach your customers. From your perspective, the whole situation will feel like you're being shaken down: It's arbitrary, unfair, and coercive.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is feeling just this way. He's trying to get Americans to care about Comcast's power to exempt "first class" streaming video delivered to Xboxes from its monthly internet usage caps.

Comcast here is playing the role of the gate agent: Video that Comcast directs down particular channels to particular devices won't trigger the cap. So customers who watch Comcast's stuff won't have to worry about losing internet access — something they need to send e-mail and otherwise participate in 21st-century life — by blowing by the cap. (That closet was available to people flying first class with instruments, but not to me.) Same pipe, same function, same physical connection to your home, different treatment.

Although Comcast is doing its best to drag this conflict down into the weeds of network architecture technicalities, the big picture is clear: This is the leading edge of the cable-ization of online life.

Imagine what's possible from Comcast's perspective: If you can slice and dice traffic, play definitional chess ("that's not the internet, that's a specialized service!"), and be the only game in town, you'll get to replicate the cable model by making sure that every successful online application owes its success in part to you and pays you tribute.

Remember, Al Jazeera can topple authoritarian regimes but cannot get carried by Comcast (and is available in only five places in the U.S.). Why is that? Because Comcast and the other major cable distributors get to decide who wins and who loses, and under what terms. Negotiation isn't a real option unless the programmer has power or is willing to share a big chunk of its revenues (or both). Now that same construct is coming to the online ecosystem.

There will be online companies who will think this distribution mechanism is a great idea, because it comes with guarantees of service quality and the ability to reliably reach a relatively affluent demographic slice of our country.

They'll all, online companies, programming entities, and cable distributors alike, call one another "partners." And, as Johnny Ola says to Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part II: "Hyman Roth always makes money for his partners. One by one, our old friends are gone. Death, natural or not, prison, ... deported. Hyman Roth is the only one left, because he always made money for his partners."

This is a good deal for a large group of large companies. But none of this is good for consumers or for upstarts. At the same time that streaming video is growing increasingly more popular, it's also becoming clearer that Comcast and its essentially unregulated cable brethren don't face competition for wired distribution other than from Verizon FiOS (which doesn't exist in most of the country and is prohibitively expensive).

It's increasingly clear that people who want to watch over-the-top video and drop their cable subscriptions will be left with leftovers, because Netflix doesn't want to be shaken down by Comcast — and programmers can't run the risk of being punished by Comcast.

In short, in a world of clouds and screens, only Comcast gets choices.

Comcast is a great American success story. It's not an evil company; its motives just don't necessarily align with the greater good. Reed Hasting's full-throated attack on Comcast can be read as either self-serving or as a defense of consumers. However it's read, it's likely that very few people in power in Washington will step forward to join Netflix in this fight against arbitrary, unregulated power over an essential consumer utility — the high-speed wire to our homes and businesses.

That's a shame.

Photo: Remote to a Comcast television receiver, By MoneyBlogNewz/flicker. Used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.

Opinion Editor: John C. Abell @johncabell