Today’s generation of college students has grown up with the Internet. Many of us remember those days of waiting hours for a 56K modem to download an MP3 and teaching our parents how to send e-mail.

We’re also used to this truth about the Internet: After the connection fee, it has no limits. We’re free to browse to our heart’s content and access whatever we can find — and, if it’s illegal, hope we don’t get caught.

Perhaps it was too good to last. But Internet service providers are finally starting to figure out ways to regulate the Internet. After all, they don’t want us to have too much fun.

Starting next month, Comcast, the second largest Internet service provider in the country, will place a 250 gigabyte per month limit on data usage.

This limit is not a reason to worry or panic. Comcast claims 250 GB is far above the monthly usage reached by an average user, which, they say, is only about 2 or 3 GB. In most cases, they say, the change won’t be noticed at all, but it’s not inconceivable to think that with the advent of high-definition video on the Internet, that ceiling could be hit sooner than Comcast thinks.

Regardless, the issue here is that a major ISP — although it doesn’t operate in Iowa, it does service 39 states and the District of Columbia — is placing a restriction for its users on what was previously unlimited.

Earlier this year Comcast was ordered by the FCC to stop restricting Internet access to its customers who were using BitTorrent. Comcast enacted the restriction to cut down on bandwidth congestion. The newly announced cap will be the company’s second attempt to address this problem.

As Comcast is one of the big players in the industry, it only makes sense for other companies to follow suit. AT&T, the only ISP bigger than Comcast, has been talking about implementing such restrictions for years.

The decline of our rights as users online could very well begin here — unless the FCC decides otherwise.