When U.S. President Donald Trump's critics have demanded to know what his supporters got in exchange for voting for the genital-grabber-in-chief, thus far those supporters have had only one concrete achievement they could really point to: the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now it looks like they will have another: the end of the Federal Communications Commission's push into "net neutrality."
A brief history of that effort is in order. Under the Obama administration, the FCC looked to write regulations that would limit the ability of internet service providers to play favorites with certain services on their network. The administration was haunted by the specter of ISPs blocking political content, accepting payments from big content providers like Netflix to prioritize their services (thus making it difficult-to-impossible for upstarts to compete), and otherwise turning the internet into a closed garden rather than the open frontier its architects envisioned.
Unfortunately, the FCC ran into a problem: Courts kept telling the commission that it didn't have the legal authority to force ISPs to keep their networks equally open to all comers. So a couple years ago, the FCC moved to reclassify ISPs as "common carriers" under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. That offered much more scope for regulation, and finally allowed the FCC to realize the dreams of internet activists everywhere.
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