On May 31, 2026, the most newsworthy thing about American net neutrality is that there is no news. The issue that once flooded the FCC with millions of public comments and crashed comedy-show websites has gone silent at the federal level — and the silence is itself the story. The fight that consumed a decade of Washington energy has not been won or lost so much as relocated.
What actually settled the question
The federal chapter closed in two steps. On January 7, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down the FCC's 2024 Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet order, holding that broadband is an "information service" under the Communications Act and therefore outside the Title II "telecommunications service" authority the agency had claimed. Crucially, the panel applied the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, declining to defer to the FCC's reading of the statute and deciding for itself what the law's "best reading" was. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation — no friend of the ruling — put it, the decision "took away the FCC's ability to meaningfully regulate internet service providers."
The second step was housekeeping. On July 14, 2025, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, under the agency's "Delete, Delete, Delete" deregulation initiative, removed 41 already-defunct net-neutrality rules and requirements — some 2,991 words — that had been invalidated in January but still sat on the books. Nothing changed for consumers; the rules had never taken effect. The deletion simply confirmed that, absent new legislation or a Title II reclassification that could survive Loper Bright, Washington is out of the net-neutrality business.
The strongest case for the rules
It is worth stating the pro-regulation argument at full strength, because it is not frivolous. Broadband is a concentrated market: tens of millions of Americans have one realistic high-speed provider, and a monopolist at the on-ramp to the internet has both the incentive and the technical ability to block rivals, throttle disfavored services, or auction off a "fast lane" to the highest bidder. Bright-line rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization are cheap insurance against conduct that, once normalized, is hard to unwind. The 2015 Open Internet Order's defenders argued that clear federal rules give edge providers — especially startups — the certainty that their packets will arrive on equal terms with an incumbent's. That is a real value, and dismissing it as hysteria does the debate no favors.
Why the predicted catastrophe didn't arrive
The trouble for that case is the evidentiary record. The United States has now spent most of the period since the 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom repeal without binding federal net-neutrality rules, and the parade of horribles — blocked websites, extortionate fast lanes, a "pay-to-play" internet — has not materialized at anything like the scale predicted. Throttling complaints have largely concerned video-quality management on unlimited mobile plans, not the blocking of competitors. The most genuinely novel 2026 flashpoint — 5G network slicing, where carriers sell guaranteed-performance lanes — is playing out in India, not the U.S., and is a question about premium enterprise services rather than censorship of the open web.
This matters for proportionate policy. Regulation should be calibrated to demonstrated harm, not to the worst imaginable conduct. When the predicted market failure repeatedly fails to appear, the burden shifts to regulators to show that heavy Title II common-carriage obligations — designed for the 1934 telephone monopoly — are the right tool for a far more competitive and fast-moving broadband market. The Sixth Circuit's instinct that Congress, not an agency toggling classifications every administration, should make that call is sound. The "regulatory whiplash" of reclassification under each new FCC is itself a cost: it deters long-horizon network investment more reliably than any single rule.
The states are now the real arena
Federal dormancy does not mean a lawless internet, because the states stepped in years ago. California's SB 822 — which bans blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization and reaches further than the 2015 federal order by regulating zero-rating — survived its industry challenge in ACA Connects v. Bonta. The Ninth Circuit declined to find it preempted in January 2022, and after, as California's attorney general announced, "multiple defeats in court," the ISPs dismissed their suit, leaving the law firmly in force. Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington maintain net-neutrality requirements of their own.
The logic is elegant and, frankly, a feature of federalism: by surrendering Title II authority, the FCC also surrendered the power to preempt state rules. A provider serving California must honor SB 822 nationwide as a practical matter, since few will build a balkanized network. So the country has backed into a de facto national baseline — set in Sacramento, not Washington — without the constitutional and administrative-law fragility of an FCC order that flips with each election.
What proportionate policy looks like from here
The stable, pro-innovation answer is not another round of agency reclassification. It is narrow federal legislation that codifies the genuine consensus — no blocking, no throttling of lawful content, transparency about network management — while leaving room for legitimate quality-of-service differentiation and declining to impose full common-carrier price and entry regulation. That would end the whiplash, give investors certainty, and protect users against the conduct that actually worries people. Until Congress acts, the quiet is not a vacuum. It is a working compromise — lighter-touch than Title II, more durable than an FCC order, and, so far, doing the job.