By November 2017, it was clear that the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Ajit Pai was going to vote to eliminate the net neutrality rules that had been put in place two years earlier. The vote was scheduled for December. The preceding weeks were dominated by a debate that produced an unusual volume of public engagement for what was, at its core, a regulatory proceeding about telecommunications infrastructure.
Net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should treat all data on their networks equally, without discriminating based on the source, destination, or type of traffic. Under a neutral network, a streaming service from a small startup is delivered at the same speed as one from a major corporation. An ISP cannot charge the streaming service for a fast lane to its customers, and cannot slow down traffic from a competitor of a service it owns.
The rules that were about to be eliminated had formalised that principle. Eliminating them would allow ISPs to create tiered access, charge different rates to different services, and potentially block or throttle services they had commercial reasons to disadvantage.
The technology industry was largely opposed to the rollback. The argument was that the neutral network had been the condition under which the modern internet was built. Companies like Google, Netflix, and Facebook had grown from nothing on a network that treated their traffic equally to every other traffic. Removing that neutrality would raise barriers to entry for the next generation of services, since small companies would be less able to afford fast-lane fees than established ones.
The counterargument was that the rules imposed unnecessary regulation on private infrastructure and created uncertainty for investment. ISPs argued that they needed flexibility to manage their networks and that the market would provide adequate protection against abuse.
What the public response demonstrated was that internet access had become basic enough infrastructure that regulatory decisions about it attracted the kind of public attention usually reserved for more visible issues. Whether that attention translated into lasting policy change was another matter. The rules were repealed in December. The legal and political battles over the decision continued well into the following years.