The two-decade federal fight over net neutrality is, for now, over — and it ended not with a sweeping pronouncement on open-internet philosophy but with a quiet application of administrative-law mechanics. On January 2, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in In re: MCP No. 185, vacated the FCC's April 2024 Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet order, which had reclassified broadband internet access service (BIAS) as a Title II common-carrier service. Applying the Supreme Court's Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) framework and the major questions doctrine, the panel concluded that BIAS is an 'information service' and that any reclassification of that magnitude requires clear authorization from Congress.
Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC declined to seek en banc rehearing or Supreme Court review. The ruling therefore stands as the law of the Sixth Circuit — and, in the absence of any countervailing federal rule, as the de facto national position. Net neutrality, as a federal regulatory project, is parked.
What the Sixth Circuit Actually Said
The opinion is narrower than its political reception suggests. The court did not hold that an open internet is bad policy. It held that an agency cannot make a decision of vast economic and political significance — flipping broadband between Title I and Title II depending on the administration — without congressional direction. That reasoning tracks Loper Bright's rejection of Chevron deference and the Court's growing insistence in West Virginia v. EPA and its progeny that 'major questions' require clear statutory hooks.
This is, in our view, the right legal outcome even if one favors strong open-internet protections. The whiplash of reclassification — Title II in 2015, Title I in 2017, Title II again in 2024 — was never a sustainable regulatory model for the most capital-intensive infrastructure in the digital economy. Investment cycles for fiber, fixed wireless, and low-Earth-orbit satellite simply do not align with four-year ideological pivots.
The State Patchwork ISPs Now Live Under
With Washington vacated, the floor is being set in Sacramento, Albany, Olympia, Salem, and Denver. Four pieces of state law matter most:
- California — SB 822 (2018), the California Internet Consumer Protection and Net Neutrality Act, bans blocking, throttling, and most paid prioritization, and reaches zero-rating practices that favor affiliated content. It survived ISP challenge after the D.C. Circuit's Mozilla v. FCC decision left states with room to act.
- New York — Affordable Broadband Act (ABA), which took effect on January 15, 2025 after the Supreme Court denied certiorari in ISP v. James in December 2024. The ABA requires providers serving New York to offer eligible low-income households a $15-per-month broadband tier (or $20 for higher speeds). This is a price mandate, not a conduct rule — a meaningfully different regulatory species.
- Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have layered conduct-style rules and state-procurement conditions that broadly mirror the 2015 federal bright lines.
Because nationwide carriers — Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile — cannot easily geofence service tiers or marketing, the strictest state rule tends to set the national operating floor. That is a familiar dynamic from California's privacy and emissions regimes.
Where the Patchwork Works — and Where It Doesn't
From a pro-innovation, proportionate-regulation perspective, the picture is mixed. State conduct rules that codify the 2015-style bright lines — no blocking, no throttling, transparency obligations — are tolerable and arguably useful. They are stable, predictable, and consistent with how ISPs already represent themselves to consumers. The FTC's Section 5 authority over unfair and deceptive acts, restored to broadband by the Sixth Circuit's reasoning, layers cleanly on top.
State price mandates are a harder problem. New York's $15 tier is sympathetic in design — affordability is a real barrier to adoption — but rate regulation by individual states is precisely the kind of fragmentation that chills network investment and disadvantages smaller and rural ISPs that lack the scale to absorb compliance overhead. Charter and others warned in their cert petition that the ABA effectively reintroduces utility-style ratemaking through the back door of state law.
What Congress Should Actually Do
The Sixth Circuit handed Congress a clean canvas. A modest, narrowly drawn open-internet statute — codifying no-blocking, no-throttling, and reasonable transparency, while preempting state rate regulation and clarifying the FCC's lane — would settle the question on terms that protect consumers without re-litigating broadband's classification every election cycle. Senator Markey's prior Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act drafts and bipartisan proposals from the Klobuchar–Thune orbit offer plausible starting points.
What the country does not need is another agency-led reclassification the next time partisan control flips. Investment in next-generation networks — including BEAD-funded fiber buildout under NTIA's revised rules — depends on regulatory durability more than regulatory severity.
The Open Internet Survives
It is worth saying plainly: the open internet was not killed on January 2, 2025. Competitive pressure, contractual commitments, FTC oversight, and state-level conduct rules together cover most of what consumers actually care about. The real risk is not a sudden wave of throttling — ISPs have shown no appetite for that fight — but slow regulatory drift toward fifty conflicting micro-regimes. Congress, not the FCC and not the Sixth Circuit, is the only institution that can fix that.