Apparently the Net is no longer neutral, so major players (like AT&T) can now start forcing people on to copper rather than fiber. The net result of this is, for some people, a few hundred extra hops and a non self-healing network. We're already seeing the fallout where I work; one customer went from 8 to 368 hops and latency climbed faster than an Me-163 on crack.
There's no way to know how it will all shake out, but traffic shaping is now a reality. This is something we've been trying to avoid since AOL crashed our party.
It will certainly all be interesting in the next few months.