On February 26, 2015, the Federal Communications Commission made its biggest announcement in years: The so-called open Internet and the related concept of net neutrality were to be enshrined in law.
In the simplest terms, the FCC would now forbid Internet service providers (ISPs) to engage in three controversial practices: “throttling” content by slowing its delivery to individual Web users, selling “fast lane” service to corporations, and blocking access to legal content of any sort. The FCC’s authority to prohibit these activities, however, rested on an extraordinarily broad-reaching decision: Internet service, the FCC ruled, would henceforth be classified as a utility, much as telephone service is. Halfway through the second decade of the 21st century, the American Internet had fallen under the control of Title II of the federal Communications Act — which was enacted in 1934.
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