A new battle is brewing at the Federal Communications Commission. It's about the future of the Internet. Entrenched interests are threatening open consumer access to the Net and stifling innovation and competition in the process.

The Internet was designed to defeat government or business control and to thwart discrimination against users, ideas or technologies. Intelligence and control were consciously placed at the ends of a non-discriminatory network. Anyone could access the Internet, with any kind of computer, for any type of application, and read or say pretty much what they wanted.

This Internet may be dying. At the behest of powerful interests, the FCC is buying into a warped vision that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that the FCC should excuse broadband providers from longstanding non-discrimination requirements.

Proponents of eliminating non-discrimination rules claim that allowing dominant broadband providers to build walls around the Internet is just ``deregulating'' and ``letting the market reign supreme,'' deploying the rhetoric of Libertarianism to serve decidedly parochial interests. The truth is that these corporations -- so fond of railing against government picking winners and users -- are now asking the FCC to do precisely that.

Telephone companies with bottleneck control have been required for years to treat on equal terms all those who seek to use their transmission facilities. So when the dial-up Internet came along, dominant telephone companies could not stop new services and new ideas from flowing over the network. E-mail exploded and streams of new services came online.

The transition from dial-up to broadband should accelerate this innovation. Instead, masked in murky discussions about an arcane classification scheme, companies are lobbying the FCC to eliminate openness rules. Safeguards put in place by Congress to guarantee consumer protection, privacy and disability rights are at risk.

Think about what could happen if your broadband provider could discriminate. It could decide which news sources or political sites you could view. It could prevent you from using children's Internet filtering technology that it didn't sell or that filtered out its own Web sites. It could prevent you from using spam-jamming programs to block its spam. It could impose restrictions on the use of virtual private networks by telecommuters and small businesses to keep them as paying customers of the public network. It could limit access to streaming video to protect its core content business. Sound far-fetched? It's already beginning to happen.

If we continue down this path, the basic end-to-end openness that made the Internet great will be gone. Control will have been turned over to those who control the bottlenecks, just like Ma Bell controlled them in the heyday of its monopoly.

Some argue that competition will save us from this fate. But today only a minority of Americans has a choice between cable and DSL. The rest of us can take whichever one is available -- if one of them is available. Until real competition between technologies limits the power of incumbents, we must not abandon anti-discrimination rules.

The FCC is rushing toward breathtaking change in regulatory policy. Whether it's the giant media companies or telecom's gatekeepers, we are closing networks, undermining competition, stifling entrepreneurship and threatening consumer choice. At this rate, it won't be long until we look back, shake our heads and wonder whatever happened to that open and dynamic high speed Internet that might have been. ``What promise it held,'' we'll say. If that happens, history won't forgive us. Nor should it.

MICHAEL J. COPPS is a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission. He wrote this for the Mercury News.