As I write these words, the FCC has just issued draft regulations abolishing the rules meant to secure “network neutrality” on the internet. Those regulations themselves were a surprising victory in the second term of the Obama administration. Obama had made neutrality a critical part of his first campaign. But it was a former industry lobbyist turned FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, along with an extraordinary deputy, Gigi Sohn, who finally pressed a constitutionally resistant FCC to adopt a substantial body of federal regulations that would go a long way toward securing for the future of the internet the kind of competitive platform that defined the very best of its past.
Those regulations were astonishingly popular — with the users of the internet and those who developed content and applications. Not so much with the network owners. The battle to build pressure on the FCC to preserve network neutrality regulations is the most successful internet fight in the history of citizen organizing. More than 20 million comments were filed with the FCC by the end of last summer, the vast majority of which demanded that the FCC preserve the rules. The geeky John Oliver had set the terms of the debate — with multiple videos making the issue as clear as it could be (2014, 2017). The internet rallied in response.
I’ve been in the network neutrality fight for a very long time. My colleague Mark Lemley and I wrote a paper in 2000 about the need to protect what…
