Try this scenario on for size: You wake up, reach for your phone, and head to your favorite news site to check the headlines. But instead of the latest news, you see a message from your cellphone carrier: “This site is not available. Please upgrade to our deluxe package to access it.”

Since you’re broke and can't upgrade your plan, you head to social media to find out what’s going on in the world. On this platform, however, your feed takes forever to load because your carrier doesn’t have a special “Fast Lane” deal with your preferred app. Growing frustrated, you try to search for alternatives to your phone company online, only to be met with a “This site has been blocked,” pop-up in your browser.

It sounds like a nightmare, but if a proposal unveiled by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week is enacted, this hellscape of extra fees, slow-loading apps and censorship could be the future of the internet.

How we got here is no mystery. Ajit Pai, the guy in charge of the FCC, was a lawyer for Verizon before joining the federal government. Now he’s rushing the agency toward a vote to kill net neutrality, the basic set of rules that prevent big internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (which owns NBC Universal) from controlling what we see and do on the web. Practically speaking, net neutrality prevents these companies from slowing down or blocking online content or charging fees to access certain types of websites, apps and services.