A return to US net neutrality rules?

Net Neutrality’s Latest Round: What the FCC Is Reconsidering

After nearly 15 years of regulatory whiplash, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is again attempting to reinstate open Internet rules for U.S. Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The deadline for public comments on the agency's latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) has just passed, marking the most recent step in a long-running policy saga that has see-sawed between adoption, litigation, and repeal.

The core premise of net neutrality is straightforward: ISPs should not discriminate against the traffic flowing through their networks. When the FCC codified these rules in 2015, it established three bright-line prohibitions: ISPs cannot block subscribers from reaching legal content, applications, or services; they cannot throttle access by relegating content to a "slow lane"; and they cannot engage in paid prioritization, charging websites for preferential access to their subscribers.

The history here is convoluted. The FCC first passed open Internet rules in 2010, which included no blocking, no unreasonable discrimination, and transparency requirements. After Verizon successfully challenged those rules in court in 2014, the D.C. Circuit made clear that such regulations required ISPs to be treated as "common carriers"—entities that must offer services to all willing customers. The FCC obliged in 2015, reclassifying ISPs as common carriers and enacting what we now know as net neutrality. Two years later, the agency reversed itself and repealed the rules. Now it wants them back.

Despite the legal ping-pong, the principles themselves have remained broadly popular—polls consistently show more than 80% of Americans support them—and in practice, ISPs have largely operated as if the rules were still in effect. The Internet has continued functioning throughout.

Defining a Broadband Provider

The rationale for regulation hasn't changed either. Broadband Internet has only become more central to daily life, covering healthcare, work, education, and entertainment. Most subscribers still face a single path to the Internet, and where multiple providers exist, switching costs are often prohibitive. The FCC's proposed rules aim to spell out the obligations that come with that market position.

The current NPRM asks fundamental questions: What has changed about the Internet since 2015? Are the original principles still correct? And crucially, how should an ISP be defined? The FCC proposes to stick with its traditional definition: a provider of Broadband Internet Access Services (BIAS), described as a mass-market service that lets consumers reach the whole Internet. Comments filed by Cloudflare support this framing, arguing that once you have a clear definition of what constitutes BIAS, everything else is, by definition, not BIAS.

The proposed definition of BIAS places the focus where it belongs: the ability of Internet end users to reach and interact with all Internet destinations without interference from their BIAS provider.

This distinction matters because the modern Internet is crowded with services that rely on, but are not themselves, broadband access—content delivery networks, developer platforms, and enterprise connectivity offerings. A clear line between underlying access and services layered on top of it keeps the regulatory scope appropriately narrow.

Interconnection's Role in the Rules

The FCC's proposal also addresses interconnection—the means by which independent networks exchange traffic. The mechanics are simple in practice: a request from a subscriber on one ISP traverses that network to a data center where it meets other networks. If the ISP and the content network peer directly, traffic exchanges hands there. Alternatively, both networks might meet at an Internet exchange, or they could route traffic through a paid IP transit provider.

Interconnection matters to this proceeding because the ISP's representation that subscribers can reach the whole Internet depends on making sensible peering and transit arrangements. Without adequate capacity, those promises fall short regardless of what happens inside the ISP's own network.

The FCC is not proposing direct regulation of interconnection pricing or terms. Instead, it suggests a case-by-case "watch, learn, and act as required" approach, positioning itself as an arbiter of last resort. That stance reflects hard-won experience. In 2014, Comcast and Netflix famously failed to keep interconnection capacity in balance, resulting in widespread buffering for subscribers—a problem they eventually resolved privately. Similar disputes have been rare in the U.S. since.

Elsewhere, the stakes are visible in real time. In Germany, subscribers on one major network have experienced degraded access to ordinary websites like GitHub, with problems likely stemming from insufficient interconnection capacity. The FCC's proposed framework would give it the authority to step in when consumer experience is harmed, even if it would prefer not to exercise that power.

Rules for a Stable Road

It's been eight years since the last net neutrality rules took effect and six years since their repeal. The Internet has grown and evolved through both periods. Should the FCC successfully reinstate these protections, the hope is that they codify principles the industry already largely follows—formal rules of the road rather than a departure from the status quo.