The Communications Act, written in 1934 and amended in 1996, sorts services into two categories. Title I covers information services and comes with light regulation. Title II covers telecommunications services and lets the Federal Communications Commission impose common carrier obligations, which is where net neutrality rules would live.
Broadband did not exist when those categories were drawn. Every fight over net neutrality in the past decade has therefore been a fight about which box a technology from the 1990s belongs in under a statute from the 1930s. That is a strange way to make policy, and both sides say so.
The distinction matters because Title II carries obligations designed for telephone monopolies: nondiscrimination, rate oversight, interconnection duties. The FCC has always said it would forbear from most of them, applying only the parts relevant to internet access. Opponents argue that forbearance is a promise rather than a limit, and that a future commission could withdraw it.
In 2015 the FCC moved broadband to Title II and adopted open internet rules. In 2017 a new commission moved it back to Title I and repealed them. In 2024 it went to Title II again under the Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet Order. In January 2025 the Sixth Circuit vacated that order entirely, and broadband returned to Title I.
Each move survived roughly as long as the administration that made it. Providers planning fibre builds and spectrum purchases against ten and twenty year horizons have operated under four different regimes in a decade.
The pattern is not accidental. Each commission has three members from the president's party and two from the other, so the majority flips whenever the White House does. A policy that depends on a five member body with a built in partisan majority will change whenever the presidency does, regardless of what anyone thinks about the underlying question.
The Sixth Circuit's ruling in Ohio Telecom Association v. FCC did not weigh the merits of net neutrality. It held that the FCC lacked the statutory authority, because the best reading of the Communications Act places broadband among information services.
The decisive factor was a Supreme Court case about fishing boats. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, decided in June 2024, ended Chevron deference, under which courts had accepted any reasonable agency interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Without it, the Sixth Circuit read the Act for itself and reached a different conclusion than the FCC had.
Departing FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel responded that Congress now needs to write open internet principles into federal law. Incoming chair Brendan Carr, a longstanding opponent of the rules, called the decision a good outcome. They agreed on the diagnosis and not the prescription.
The FCC did not seek Supreme Court review, and the deadline passed in April 2025. Broadband has remained under Title I since. Whether a future commission tries again depends on whether it believes it can distinguish its order from the one the Sixth Circuit set aside, which after Loper Bright is a harder argument to make.
Between 2017 and 2024 the rules were not in force, which is the closest thing to a natural experiment this debate has produced. The widely predicted outcome, a tiered internet with paid fast lanes and blocked competitors, did not arrive. Average speeds rose and investment continued.
Opponents of regulation treat this as decisive. Supporters argue that providers were restrained by the credible threat of the rules returning, and by state laws in California and elsewhere that imposed similar requirements regardless of federal policy. Both readings fit the evidence, which is why the argument has not been settled by it.
There is a third reading worth noting. The most concerning behaviour may not be blocking at all but zero rating, where a provider exempts its own video service from a customer's data cap while competitors count against it. That practice grew during the repeal years, was never clearly prohibited under either regime, and does not fit neatly into the blocking and throttling framework the debate is usually conducted in.
Almost nobody defends blocking or deliberately degrading a competitor's service. The narrow versions of net neutrality command broad support in polling across party lines. What people disagree about is who should impose the rule and how far it should reach.
One side sees a market with too few providers, where customers cannot switch and a rule is the only meaningful constraint. The other sees an agency reinterpreting a nine decade old statute to claim authority Congress never granted, in a way that reverses every four years.
Both positions can be held by someone who wants an open internet. That is why the recurring proposal, from figures on both sides, is legislation written for the technology as it now exists rather than another reclassification. It has been drafted before, in 2014, and never came to a vote.
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