The Open Internet principles (as the FCC has always referred to net neutrality) long predate the 2015 Order.

If the FCC or Congress revises or even reverses the public utility order, isn’t that the end of net neutrality? No. But reclassification, separate from the net neutrality rules themselves, was less popular with broadband providers, which, along with leading internet engineering groups and companies like Google and Netflix, were concerned that the FCC would use the broad public utility powers it granted itself to regulate the internet well beyond enforcing net neutrality. More on that later.) At the time, advocates hailed reclassification as a necessary foundation for net neutrality. (Pai was one of the commissioners who voted against it. The order passed, in early 2015, by a party-line vote of 3-2. The 2015 order mostly addressed a radical policy shift from competing private networks to public utility treatment for broadband, or “reclassification,” with authority to enforce net neutrality being a mere side effect. This is an FCC rule, advocated for by President Obama, that based new net neutrality rules on old public utility laws originally written to regulate the former Bell telephone monopoly. Next, it’s important to understand the 2015 Open Internet Order. (Increasingly, the distinction is meaningless.) And, as with other issues, there are D.C.-based advocacy groups, regularly quoted in the press, many of which have with strong pro- or anti-regulatory biases. Then there are the businesses in the internet ecosystem, often unhelpfully divided into “edge providers,” such as Google, Facebook, and Netflix, and “infrastructure” providers, including engineering groups, ISPs, and companies that support the backbone of the internet. There’s the president, who appoints the members of the Commissions, and Congress, which is solely responsible for delegating legislative authority to them. First, there’s the FCC, which along with other, sometimes rival, agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), represents the main U.S. Here, the effort to transform Internet Service Providers (ISPs) into utilities is a cure far worse than the problem. My view is pretty simple: Most efforts to regulate the internet make things worse in the long term - or, in this case, much sooner. To be clear, I agree with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who recently acknowledged that net neutrality principles have been and will continue to be strictly enforced not by regulation but by powerful market forces.

In the interest of exploring these issues, I’ve compiled some of the most important questions about net neutrality and the 2015 order, which grounded the rules in 1930s-era public utility law. Every move by newly appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai generates a chorus of consumer advocates bemoaning the death of neutrality and the “end of the internet as we know it.” Businesses and consumers are being warned that Republican lawmakers are united in their determination to not just modify the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order, but to “kill,” “destroy,” “dismantle,” or “abolish,” the open internet, as soon as possible. Since Donald Trump’s election, the rhetoric surrounding net neutrality’s imminent demise has been frenzied. Even the term “net neutrality” was coined not by an engineer but by a legal academic, in 2003. It sits uncomfortably at the intersection of highly technical internet architecture and equally complex principles of administrative law. Despite being a simple idea, net neutrality has proven difficult to translate into U.S. It means that a broadband internet provider should not block, slow, or otherwise unfairly discriminate against any websites or online services. Net neutrality is a basic, but notoriously squishy, principle.

Net neutrality faxbot