Net neutrality was back, until it wasn’t

The fight for net neutrality doesn’t seem to have been truly won or lost.

Federal neutrality rules have been on and off over the past 15 years. The FCC passed the Open Internet Order under President Barack Obama in 2010, which prohibited Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic, the bedrock rule of net neutrality. Then, at the request of these ISPs, the court blocked their rules. The FCC approved an updated framework in 2015, only to be rescinded in 2017 under President Donald Trump’s first administration. It looked poised to return in 2024, but the victory lasted only months before a court overturned it — the beginning of a difficult year for the open Internet and broadband regulation as a whole.

Rather than fight the court’s ruling against net neutrality, the Trump administration’s FCC preemptively removed the rules — without an opportunity for public comment. The move was part of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, which aims to eliminate “unnecessary” regulations.

Internet service providers have long described net neutrality rules as burdensome. For example, Jonathan Spalter, president and CEO of USTelecom, claimed that the 2024 vote to reinstate the FCC’s net neutrality rules was a “counterproductive, unnecessary, and anti-consumer regulatory distraction.”

However, Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at the nonprofit Free Press, says in an interview: Edge ISPs often feel little financial impact from these rules, and may even actually comply with them. “When a lot of cable and phone companies talk to business people and then go back to investors and financial analysts, they say, ‘Yes, this is how we do things anyway.’ So, I think a lot of their complaints about the supposed ‘burdens’ of these rules are really just ideological in nature.”

Why bother with regulations if ISPs are already compliant (in theory)? It is about accountability and transparency. The regulations ensure that voters, not ISPs, set the rules of the online road – otherwise there is nothing to stop them from changing their operations in the future.

The FCC’s anti-regulatory agenda in telecom reaches far beyond net neutrality. Zhao Jun Liu, senior legislative assistant at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), points to the FCC’s recent move to reverse Biden-era communications cybersecurity rules. Carr’s FCC also backed away from requirements to provide “nutrition labels” for their broadband prices, claiming that displaying such details was “cumbersome” for ISPs.

“There’s a lot of this theme, which is that ISPs just want to do what they want without limits and no one tells them how to do it, when to do it, [or] “On any timeline,” Liu says Edge.

Federal regulations for ISPs seem to be disappearing like wet paper, but fortunately they are not the only line of defense for consumers.

State lawmakers adopted net neutrality in late 2010, after repealing a 2015 FCC order. California’s 2018 net neutrality law, considered the country’s gold standard, includes some policies that were left out of the 2015 federal standards, such as the zero-rating ban, which allows ISPs to exempt certain apps or services from customer data caps. Several other states have adopted similar rules, including Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Jersey and Vermont.

The recent cancellation has led to a new wave of such efforts. Maine passed a bipartisan net neutrality bill in June, without Gov. Janet Mills’ signature. A bill to expand “public benefit” net neutrality rules to include Internet service providers was also introduced in Pennsylvania in March. Similar bills were introduced in the New York State Senate and State Assembly this year as well.

ISPs have so far largely avoided overtly offering paid priorities or traditional “fast lanes,” something net neutrality proponents attribute at least in part to state-level regulation. “I believe that state-level net neutrality laws, and the threat of new laws, have kept some of the worst outcomes in check,” John Bergmeier, legal director at the nonprofit Public Knowledge, said in a statement. Edge.

But this frequency may change. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T are all offering network slicing on their 5G networks, allowing some customers (mainly enterprises) to pay for virtual networks with faster speeds — which, while they don’t inherently violate net neutrality standards, could lay the groundwork for slivered networks.

State-level laws are also the next target in the deregulation bloc. In October, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) began pressuring states to exempt ISPs from their net neutrality laws so that they would be eligible for funding from the Biden-era Broadband Rights, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. In a speech at the Hudson Institute, NTIA Director Ariel Roth described state-level net neutrality laws as “a form of price regulation,” the practice of limiting what companies can charge for their services.

Accusations of interest rate regulation have become common, but the Free Press’s Matt Wood believes these accusations are exaggerated. While BEAD prohibits rate regulation, state-level net neutrality laws do not inherently fall under this classification. Opponents of net neutrality “characterize any consumer protection as price regulation when I don’t think it actually has any legitimate impact on the prices companies can charge for their broadband services,” Wood says.

Again, this is part of a larger deregulation agenda. The EFF’s Zhaojun Liu noted similarities to efforts to leverage BEAD funds against AI regulation, including through a recently signed executive order. These attempts to link AI regulation and broadband financing are a “new development,” Liu says. “This is very much Brendan Carr, specific to the Trump administration.”

At a time when broadband expansion remains vital, the Trump administration is threatening much-needed infrastructure funding to attack technology regulation. Unfortunately, despite being a bipartisan platform, BEAD is where this discussion is currently taking place. As Wood says: “Why make broadband penetration, which is so popular and has so much bipartisan support, another front in these culture wars?”

Legal experts have pointed out that Roth and the NTIA do not necessarily have the authority to preempt state-level net neutrality laws in order to fund BEAD. However, it seems likely that discussions around these funds will further delay BEAD’s rollout, and with it the program’s mission to expand broadband development, particularly to underserved communities.

So, while the tug of war over net neutrality regulations continues, issues with broadband access also persist in the United States. Internet affordability is an ongoing challenge across the country, but especially in rural areas where people often have only one or two providers to choose from. BEAD was intended to help address this problem, but now it may become embroiled in the debate over AI regulations.

Even in areas with strong internet access, high prices remain a problem, especially since the Affordable Calling Program closed nearly two years ago. Furthermore, the United States is seeing a wave of bills that would spread broad age verification rules online, sparking debates over privacy, censorship, and freedom of expression.

All of this – and not just the fate of net neutrality – leaves the Internet in a precarious state until 2026.