Yes, the U.S. net neutrality debacle will impact people in Canada. No, we can’t sit on the sidelines.

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Here are four ways Canadians could be impacted:

1.Your favorite U.S. web services could be slowed or disappear entirely

To be clear, if Trump and Pai succeed in their Internet tollbooth plan, some of your favorite online services could be slowed to a crawl or blocked. As the saying goes, even if you don’t live in the U.S., many of your favorites web services do.

So if Reddit, Wikipedia, Etsy or any other online service can’t afford to pay a new special fee to stay out of the Internet slow lane, they could fade away for everyone since the US is such an important market.

2. Canadian-based services and traffic stifled

Web services from Canada and elsewhere will likely face the same “prioritization” fees or worse if they want to reach US users. So Canadian-based Hootsuite, Shopify, New/Mode and Europe-based Prezi, and SoundCloud, could be forced to pay fees or be slowed down for U.S. users. There’s no guarantee that U.S. Telecoms will give them a fair deal, especially in the Trump-era.

Then there’s also the fact that as Internet law expert Professor Michael Geist has noted, “A lot of Canadian internet traffic goes through the US, and we’re not totally sure whether that will be affected”.

3. Online services could get more expensive

Even if the telecoms don’t hit us with new fees directly, the new costs born on services like Netflix are sure to be passed along to Internet users one way or another. As Executive Director of OpenMedia Laura Tribe put it to the CBC: “Extra costs just to get their content streaming in the U.S. is going to probably be passed along to both American and Canadian consumers in the form of higher subscription fees.”

If that sounds like a transfer of wealth from Internet users to giant telecom conglomerates, that’s because that’s exactly what this is.

4. The contagion could spread to the Canadian Internet environment

An Internet tollbooth in the U.S. could also have a domino effect in countries around the world. Since the U.S. is so dominant in the global economy there’s likely to be a renewed push by big telecoms everywhere to establish their own version of top down control of the Internet in other countries.

Canada’s arrogant big telecoms will for sure push for more powers to regulate our use of the Internet here in Canada. Big Telecom, as the group of 4 Canadian conglomerates is often called, has consistently tried to undermine Net Neutrality since we won it back in 2009. OpenMedia and others successfully pushed forward when they came back at us, but that will be much more challenging if the U.S. guts Net Neutrality.

In short, if this Internet tollbooth is implemented unchallenged, we’re looking at a much more centralized, costly and restricted internet.

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