Instead of listening to the thousand of startups and investors who argue that ending net neutrality would damage online innovation, FCC chair Ajit Pai is pushing a vote this Thursday to dismantle two decades of open internet protections in one of the biggest corporate giveaways in history.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ryan Singel (@rsingel) is media and strategy fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and the CEO/cofounder of Contextly.

Existing net neutrality protections have made it cheaper to start an online business than a cafe. I know because in 2012 I left a job I loved at WIRED to pursue my own startup dream of improving publishers’ recommendations and start Contextly, which is still going strong.

I truly am one of the lucky ones. I got a shot at starting something new because the cost of launching a new idea was extremely low. Future entrepreneurs should have the same chance I did.

When I started Contextly, we paid $19.95 a month for one server; a year later, when I left my job to run the company full time, Contextly’s recommendations were showing on tens of millions of news articles a month, and we only paid $288.55 per month for 8 servers. That’s cheap. I didn’t need outside funding to launch a business.

But if Pai’s plan had been in effect, I couldn’t have afforded to start Contextly, and I wouldn’t have. Here’s why: Under Pai’s proposal, broadband providers will be allowed to charge all websites and services, including startups, simply to reach an ISP’s subscribers. That’s a huge threat to the low cost of starting a company, and it totally up-ends the economics of the internet.

It’s also what ISPs have been wanting for years. In 2006, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre said that "for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts." In 2013, Verizon—Pai’s former employer—told a federal court that it should be free to charge any site any amount of money to reach its customers.

These types of fees have never existed in the US in the history of the internet. When ISPs began floating the idea to charge fees, more than a decade ago, the FCC began investigating whether they should be allowed; it finally prohibited such fees in 2010. So when Aji Pai says eliminating net neutrality would simply be taking us back to the pre-2015 internet, that simply isn’t true.

But Pai’s plan doesn’t stop there. The FCC chair wants to allow ISPs to create fast lanes inside their networks; online services will have to pay to stay out of the slow lane.

In the proposed order, Pai tells startups not to worry about fast lanes, also known as paid prioritization, because only online services with very specialized requirements will need them:

“We disagree with commenters asserting that [paid prioritization] is likely to significantly burden edge providers by requiring them to negotiate with hundreds of ISPs because as discussed, paid prioritization is likely to be focused only on applications with require special Quality of Service guarantees....”

The argument is simply wrong. Speed matters online. You have to be fast just to compete. Users bounce and customers don’t buy if sites or apps are slow to load or feel laggy. If there are fast lanes, every website, every startup, and every small merchant will have to be in them, not just those that need speed—a k a Quality of Service—guarantees.

Pai goes on to say that fast lanes will help tiny startups against larger competitors: