Net neutrality was back, until it wasn’t

The fight for net neutrality never seems to be truly won or lost.

Federal net neutrality rules have been on and off for the past 15 years. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Open Internet Order under President Barack Obama in 2010, prohibiting ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful internet traffic, the baseline rule of net neutrality. Then, at the request of those ISPs, a court blocked its rules. An updated framework was passed by the FCC in 2015, only to be overturned in 2017 under President Donald Trump’s first administration. It seemed poised for a comeback in 2024, but the victory lasted mere months before a court overturned it — kicking off a rough 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 has preemptively removed the rules — without a chance for public comment. The move was part of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative, which aims to wipe out “unnecessary” regulations.

ISPs have long described net neutrality rules as onerous. For instance, USTelecom president and CEO Jonathan Spalter claimed 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 with The Verge that ISPs often feel little financial impact from these rules, and may even already be complying with them. “A lot of cable and phone companies, when they talk to their business people and then go back to investors and to the financial analysts, they’re saying, ‘Yep, this is how we’re doing it anyway.’ So, I think a lot of their complaints about the supposed ‘burdens’ from these rules are really just ideological in nature.”

Why bother with regulations if ISPs are already (theoretically) compliant? It comes down to accountability and transparency. Regulations ensure voters, not ISPs, are setting the rules of the road online — otherwise, there’s nothing to stop them from changing their operations down the line.

The FCC’s anti-regulatory agenda for telecoms reaches even further than net neutrality. Chao Jun Liu, senior legislative associate at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), notes the FCC’s recent move to reverse Biden-era telecom cybersecurity rules. Carr’s FCC also rolled back requirements for them to provide “nutrition labels” for their broadband pricing, claiming it was “burdensome” for ISPs to display those details.

“There is very much this theme of, ISPs just want to do whatever they want to do with no limits and nobody telling them how to do it, when to do it, [or] on what timeline,” Liu tells The Verge.

Federal regulations for ISPs seem to be dissolving like wet paper, but luckily they’re not the only line of defense for consumers.

State legislators took up net neutrality in the late 2010s, after the reversal of the FCC’s 2015 order. California’s 2018 net neutrality law, considered the nation’s gold standard, even includes some policies that were left out of the 2015 federal standards, like banning zero-rating, which allows ISPs to exempt certain apps or services from customers’ data caps. Several other states have adopted similar rules, including Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Jersey, and Vermont.

The most recent repeal has prompted a new wave of these efforts. Maine passed a bipartisan net neutrality bill in June, without a signature from Gov. Janet Mills. A bill to expand “public utility” net neutrality rules to ISPs 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 shied away from openly offering paid prioritization or conventional “fast lanes,” something supporters of net neutrality attribute at least partly to state-level regulations. “I think that state-level net neutrality laws, and the threat of new ones, has kept some of the worst outcomes in check,” says John Bergmayer, legal director at the nonprofit Public Knowledge, in a statement to The Verge.

This reluctance, however, could be changing. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T all offer network slicing on their 5G networks, allowing certain customers (mainly businesses) to pay for virtual networks with higher speeds — which, while it doesn’t inherently violate net neutrality standards, could lay the groundwork for segmented networks.

State-level laws are also the next target on the deregulation chopping block. In October, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) began a push to pressure states into exempting ISPs from their net neutrality laws in order to be eligible for funding from the Biden-era Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. In a speech at the Hudson Institute, NTIA administrator Arielle Roth called state-level net neutrality laws “a form of rate regulation,” the practice of determining what companies can charge for their services.

Accusations of rate regulation have become common, but Free Press’s Matt Wood argues that they’re overblown. While BEAD does prohibit rate regulation, state-level net neutrality laws don’t inherently fall under that label. Opponents of net neutrality “characterize any and every consumer safeguard as rate regulation when I don’t think it actually has any legitimate impact on the rates companies can charge for the services they offer in the broadband space,” says Wood.

And, again, this is part of a larger deregulatory agenda. EFF’s Chao Jun Liu pointed out similarities with efforts to leverage BEAD funds against AI regulation, including through a recently signed executive order. These attempts to connect AI regulation and broadband funding are “a new development,” says Liu. “This is very much a Brendan Carr, Trump administration special.”

At a time when broadband expansion remains vital, the Trump administration is threatening much-needed infrastructure funding to attack tech regulation. Unfortunately, despite being a bipartisan program, BEAD is where this debate is currently being played out. As Wood says, “Why are we making broadband deployment, which is pretty popular and pretty bipartisan, into yet another front in these culture wars?”

Legal experts have pointed out that Roth and the NTIA don’t necessarily have the authority to preempt state-level net neutrality laws for the sake of BEAD funding. However, it seems likely the debates over those funds will delay BEAD’s rollout even further and, along 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, so do issues with broadband access in the US. Internet affordability is a persistent 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 that issue, but now could get bogged down in debate over AI regulations.

Even in areas with robust internet access, high prices are still a problem, particularly since the Affordable Connectivity Program was shut down almost two years ago. On top of that, the US is experiencing a wave of bills that could roll out widespread age verification rules online, sparking debate about privacy, censorship, and free speech.

All of this — not just the fate of net neutrality — leaves the internet in a perilous state going into 2026.