Net neutrality is dead. 
 
 At least that's the verdict of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which today struck down a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order from 2010 that forced Internet service providers (ISPs) like Verizon, AT&T;, Comcast and Time Warner Cable to abide by the principles of network neutrality. These principles broadly stipulate that ISP network management must be transparent, and that ISPs can't engage in practices that block, stifle or discriminate against (lawful) websites or traffic types on the Internet. 
 
 That's the bare bones story, wrapped in ugly acronyms (FCC, ISP, etc.). But why should you care that network neutrality ("net neutrality") may be gone for good? 
 
 1. No more net neutrality means ISPs can now discriminate against content they dislike. 
 
 Everyone gets their Internet from an Internet service provider -- an ISP like AT&T;, Verizon, Comcast or Time Warner Cable. Under net neutrality rules, these ISPs have to treat all content you access over the Internet "roughly the same way" -- they can't speed up traffic from websites they like or delay competitor's traffic. 
 
 Now, with net neutrality gone, ISPs can discriminate, favoring their business partners while delaying or blocking websites they don't like. Think your cable CEO hates free online porn? Now you'll know for sure! 
 
 2. No more net neutrality means ISPs can now force websites to PAY for faster content delivery. 
 
 You know how some sites you go to just load slower than others? Usually, that's just because the slower site is image heavy, poorly coded, or dealing with intense server load. But with net neutrality gone, ISPs can now start charging hefty fees to websites that want quick content delivery -- shifting the long load times to poorer sites that can't pay up. 
 
 Prefer indie retailers to Amazon.com? You may be in for a frustrating future. 
 
 3. Destroying net neutrality is bad for small businesses. 
 
 Put together items one and two and it becomes clear -- negating net neutrality is bad for small businesses. If ISPs force website owners pay for faster load times, tiny retailers and personal websites will be the ones to suffer from slower content delivery. 
 
 Alternately -- or additionally -- ISPs will have no reason not to favor partner sites: Comcast, for instance, might favor the website of NBC News (which it owns) over competing outlets like Fox or CNN. Still, it's the indies again that will lose out here. While big sites might either get special treatment from their owners or have the means to pay in order to get placed in a bundle, smaller, independent networks won't get any notice from ISPs. Expand this out to music sites, web publishing, etc., and you begin to see the problem. 
 
 In extreme cases, ISPs may hinder or block content that isn't produced by partners -- much like AT&T; did when it owned the telephone networks back in the day. 
 
 4. Without net neutrality, entire types of online traffic (like Netflix) may be in jeopardy. 
 
 Netflix watchers and BitTorrent users might want to beware -- soon your beloved services may not work like they used to. Now that net neutrality's down for the count, ISPs can discriminate against entire types of traffic: For instance, an ISP could slow or block all peer-to-peer file sharing, or all online video streaming. 
 
 Think it sounds unbelievably stupid for an ISP to stifle a certain traffic types indiscriminately? Comcast has seen reason to stifle both streaming video and peer-to-peer in the past. 
 
 From an ISP's perspective, discriminating against some traffic types makes business sense: Many ISPs are also cable television providers, which means the "cord-cutting" enabled by peer-to-peer and streaming online video isn't good for their bottom line. 
 
 5. Without net neutrality, your ISPs can make even more money without actually improving the Internet. 
 
 Right now, America's broadband is slow. It's slow because ISPs can already make gobs of money by charging the rich a ton for high-quality Internet while leaving the rest of America with subpar (or no) service. 
 
 Now, with net neutrality gone, ISPs will be able to make even more money off their existing customer base. They won't need to improve service or bring broadband to rural areas because they'll be able to keep growing (financially, at least) by charging content providers more for faster delivery and charging customers more for faster access. In all likelihood, Tuesday's ruling means the problems with America's Internet will be magnified. 
 
 Clarification: A previous hypothetical scenario in this article implied Time Warner Corporation still owned Time Warner Cable, which was spun off in 2009. The example has been changed. ||||| Those comments were made with today's decision looming in the distance. "We are concerned about the two-sided market," pro-net-neutrality group Free Press told BuzzFeed at the time. Brent Skorup of the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University, representing the other side of the issue, said that Wheeler was "a little more industry friendly" than his predecessor. 
 
 This comes just a few weeks after the new chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the telecom industry, startled net neutrality advocates with this quote, given during a Q&A following his first formal public address: 
 
 Today, vital portions of the FCC's Open Internet rules were struck down in federal court. These rules, put in place in 2010, were designed to preserve what advocates call net neutrality — an assurance that internet providers can't favor one kind of traffic over another, or charge for access to certain parts of the internet. All traffic, according to the rules, was to be treated equally. Verizon challenged these rules, and mostly won. 
 
 It's an intoxicating pitch, and one you'll hear soon. The country's largest data providers are mulling it; their partners are figuring out how to make it work; the FCC, which is in charge of identifying downsides and regulating such things, just lost much of its ability to do so. Caught at the whirling nexus of theory and regulation and commerce, the average internet user's fate is uncertain. But today, a new and unexpected possibility has made itself clear: We may be entering the era of sponsored data — the era of an internet that we don't directly pay for, but that we also don't control. It's the old net neutrality nightmare, in other words, disguised as a gift. 
 
 What if you didn't have to pay for your data plan? What if the biggest data hogs on your phone — your music apps, your streaming video apps — didn't count toward your monthly limit? 
 
 For years, the net neutrality nightmare scenario was as follows: Carriers, such as Comcast, could charge different amounts for access to different tiers of the internet. The basic tier might include email and basic browsing; the next could include Facebook and Twitter; the final tier could include Netflix, YouTube, or Spotify. These tiers would be divided not by bandwidth or speed requirements, but by content type . The internet would become a club with various VIP sections, arbitrarily laid out to benefit internet providers. 
 
 The FCC chairman's own statement, while suggesting he is weighing an appeal, was cold comfort to his predecessor's allies. "I am committed to maintaining our networks as engines for economic growth, test beds for innovative services and products, and channels for all forms of speech protected by the First Amendment." 
 
 "Pretty much everybody in the industry pushed back very hard against it," he said. "There were a lot of people who came around to network neutrality — a reason why these rules were compromised, and had industry buy-in, was that a lot of people in the industry preferred these rules to reclassification." This is a potentially crippling defeat for net neutrality advocates. Trying to reclassify ISPs as utilities, essentially, would give anti-regulation opponents a much clearer position. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which opposes net neutrality, declared victory in a statement, saying the cause is "dead and buried." 
 
 By "treating broadband like a communications service," Free Press is suggesting categorizing internet providers as "common carriers," like phone companies, a possibility that, in comparison to preserving 2010's stricken FCC rules, is seen by insiders as a long shot. "From a legal perspective, it's easier," Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, told BuzzFeed. "What makes it difficult is the politics." 
 
 "This ruling means there is no one who can protect us from ISPs that block or discriminate against websites, applications or services," says a statement from the organization. Tell the FCC to start treating broadband like a communications service, and to restore its Net Neutrality rules." 
 
 This was the vision that propelled net neutrality into the public consciousness, and that led to its inclusion in Barack Obama's 2008 platform. Since then, the nightmare scenario has evolved, with the help of wireless providers. It became more subtle but no less insidious to net neutrality advocates; rather than charging users more for access to different parts of the internet, carriers would charge content providers to make sure their content worked well. The fears changed: Now it wasn't just users that were at risk, but upstart companies. Facebook might be able to afford preferential treatment. But what about the startup that wants to replace Facebook? This is the kind of behavior that Verizon, and others, won the right to engage in today, and it's more likely than ever to come to pass. "We're going to see more pushing of the envelope," Feld says. "Look, you know, Verizon said that if it weren't for these rules, we'd be out negotiating all kinds of deals for [preferential] access." In a statement today, Verizon assured customers that it wouldn't block content, but left open the possibility of preferential access on the service side. 
 
 In the last year, a third, equally insidious but even more subtle scenario has emerged, and today became a much realer possibility. On a less regulated internet, content providers — websites and services — might be able to pay for their users' data. Here's how AT&T describes its "Sponsored Data" plans: 
 
 Similar to 1-800 phone numbers or free shipping for internet commerce, AT&T's new 'Sponsored Data' service opens up new data use options for AT&T wireless customers and customer-friendly mobile broadband channels to businesses that choose to participate as sponsors… 
 
 
 
 With the new Sponsored Data service, data charges resulting from eligible uses will be billed directly to the sponsoring company; the customer simply enjoys their content via AT&T's wireless data network. Customers will see the service offered as AT&T Sponsored Data, and the usage will appear on their monthly invoice as Sponsored Data. 
 
 If you wanted to access the internet 15 years ago, you would sign up for a service plan with a company like AOL. For a fee — maybe $20, $30, $40 — you would get as much monthly access as you could use, more or less. Five years later, you would have made a similar arrangement with your cable or phone company for broadband access. Five years after that, you would still have a broadband connection, but you could also enter a new contract, this time with your cell phone company: For a monthly fee, you would get access to the entire internet from your smartphone. Your service might be tiered by speed or data allowances, but it has always been a pure pipe to the internet. How you use your bits has been up to you. 
 
 Sponsored data attacks the only major unappealing part of this long-standing tradition: its cost. It proposes the possibility that video sites, music sites, and social networking sites could pay for their users' access. It also poses a more fundamental question: If all your favorite services didn't count toward your phone's data plan, why would you bother having a data plan at all? 
 
 Recasting internet access as a subsidiary of internet services is not a familiar idea, but it's arriving in many forms. In fact, in the developing world, Facebook has been operating such a service for some time. Facebook for Every Phone, through deals with carriers, provides access to basic Facebook services and apps for free. Facebook isn't just subsidizing some internet experiences, here — it's subsidizing users' very first internet experiences. "It's like the early days of broadcast television," Feld says, "where you would pay affiliates to carry your programming." 
 
 The appeal of such an arrangement to a regular customer is obvious: you would pay less for your data, at least directly. "Consumers don't like it when you take things away," says Feld, so "carriers need to be more subtle than that." They will do so primarily, he says, by creating "artificial scarcity" — data caps — and requiring customers, or now, internet companies, to buy their way around them. 
 
 The appeal of the latter arrangement to the internet's largest companies is even more obvious: It would give them unprecedented control over the internet and its users. If, in this future, you're choosing between two streaming music services, and one of them pays for your data, there's a very good chance you're going to pick that one. 
 
 But which one would be able to do that? The largest one, the incumbent. "This will have profound implications for the internet's ecology," says Feld. Worse, he worries, companies that were willing to fight for net neutrality in the old days won't be such strong allies in 2014, now that they are the largest incumbents on the internet. "They're big, and they can negotiate," he says. "Once you're on the inside, exclusion doesn't seem like such a bad thing. If you're Google, maybe getting access for YouTube is what you want, rather than what you want to fight." ||||| You can say this much for new FCC Chair Ajit Pai: He keeps his word. Unfortunately for people who believe that internet service providers should not be allowed to determine what sites you visit, Pai’s key promise has been to kill net neutrality. Today, Pai pulled back the curtain on his plan to undo all recent efforts to regulate broadband. 
 
 Pai outlined his vision for the future of net neutrality today in Washington, D.C., at an event held by anti-regulation think tank FreedomWorks. 
 
 The Chair’s goal is to replace the neutrality rules that have been in place since 2015 with a voluntary standard. In short, we’d lose the law that tells companies what they can’t do and punishes them for breaking it, and instead replace it with a pinky swear from Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and everyone else that, sure, they’ll play along — until they don’t. 
 
 Pai called the Internet, “the greatest free-market success story in history,” thanks, he said, to a hands-off approach by government. 
 
 According to Pai, that all changed in 2015 thanks to “politics,” not law or facts. To counterbalance the “party-line” vote of 2015, then, he has a new proposal that, too, is certain to find support and opposition based on party lines. 
 
 Let’s break it down. 
 
 The Current Rule 
 
 The version of net neutrality we have now is actually something of a 2.0, after the original 2010 iteration was gutted by a Verizon lawsuit in Jan. 2014. That left only a few ways that the FCC could regroup and create a stronger rule that would stand up in court. 
 
 So, after nearly a year spent receiving public comment and dithering over details, the FCC finally adopted the Open Internet Rule in 2015. 
 
 The Rule reclassified broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Enacting that classification gave the FCC legal authority to then create three bright-line rules for what ISPs are and aren’t allowed to do with your internet traffic: 
 
 Broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices. They may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of content, application, services, or any classes thereof. They may not favor some internet traffic over other internet traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind — no paid prioritization or fast lanes. 
 
 The telecom industry and its lobbyists sued over the rule, but in June 2016 a federal appeals court sided with the Commission and let the rule stand. 
 
 What Pai Wants To Have Instead 
 
 Today, Pai is proposing a new rule that will have three main sections. 
 
 First, he wants to straight-up undo the Title II classification. Instead of putting ISPs under the same broad heading as phone services (which many of them also are, these days), they’d go back to being considered “information services” regulated under Title I of the law. 
 
 “This Title I classification was expressly upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005,” Pai said, and to his view, “it’s more consistent with the facts and the law.” 
 
 However, in the 2014 ruling that upended the first net neutrality rule, the court held that so long as ISPs are considered information services and not telecommunications services, the Commission doesn’t have the authority to put a net neutrality rule in place. So without that classification as the foundation, other things start to fall apart. 
 
 Second, Pai wants to scrap the part of the Open Internet Rule known as the conduct standard. Critics have claimed that the standard is too vague, because it was designed to be deliberately open-ended, not tied to any existing tech or standards in order to be future-proof. That standard says that ISPs should not harm consumers or edge providers, but does not delineate how. 
 
 The standard is the guideline by which, for example, the FCC evaluated AT&T and Verizon to determine if their sponsored data and zero rating programs were harmful to consumers. (The Commission said in 2016 that they were; in Feb. 2017, the FCC changed its position and completely scrapped the reports from last year.) 
 
 To Pai, this is bad. Zero-rating is popular among consumers, he said, but, “the prior FCC had met the enemy, and it was consumers getting something for free from their wireless providers.” 
 
 (The recent renaissance of unlimited data plans suggests that wireless carriers have found a better way than targeted zero-rating to attract and retain subscribers.) 
 
 Lastly, Pai is opening the floor to comment on what to replace the Commission’s three key bright-line rules with, if anything. 
 
 Why Change? 
 
 In his remarks, Pai repeated his claim that the Open Internet Rule has depressed investment in broadband infrastructure, and must be stopped. 
 
 “Among our nation’s 12 largest Internet service providers, domestic broadband capital expenditures decreased by 5.6% percent, or $3.6 billion” between 2014 and 2016, Pai said. “This decline is extremely unusual. It is the first time that such investment has declined outside of a recession in the Internet era.” 
 
 There is one huge problem with Pai’s assertion, a statistic for which the FCC has not provided a source. It points to investment figures from 2014 through 2016, but the neutrality rules weren’t approved until Feb. 2015 and didn’t go into effect until June 2015. So the Chair is blaming a rule that didn’t exist for a large part of the time period he’s talking about. 
 
 And indeed, looking at publicly available financial data for major ISPs in both 2016 and 2017 gives no indication that providers are scaling back on investment. 
 
 Pai also claims that it’s bad for smaller ISPs, “which simply do not have the means or the margins to withstand the Title II regulatory onslaught.” 
 
 As to why a rule saying, effectively, “don’t do this thing you already claim you aren’t doing and have no need to do” is a regime that would cost providers money, however, he did not explain, saying only that Title II “hung like a black cloud” over small businesses. In short, his argument is that Title II costs money, and money means that small ISPs are not serving poor and/or rural customers as well as they could. 
 
 His goals, Pai says, are to bring high-speed broadband access to more Americans; to create jobs; to boost competition; and to protect your privacy. 
 
 The first three are all related to the idea of investment. The privacy protection, however, connects directly back to the now-defunct ISP privacy rule. 
 
 MORE: The ISP privacy rule is dead, but could anyone bring it back? 
 
 The FCC adopted that rule — which limited what your ISP could do with your data before getting your permission — in Oct. 2016, based on the legal underpinning of Title II regulation. But Congress passed, and the White House signed, a resolution killing off that rule. That puts privacy into a legal limbo: The FTC can’t regulate common carriers, and the FCC can’t regulate ISPs. Pai’s solution? Kill the common carrier designation, to hand over privacy protection to the FTC. 
 
 Why This Is A Terrible Idea 
 
 The FTC has very limited authority to make industry-wide regulations, and can really only create rules that prohibit unfair or deceptive business practices. 
 
 So it can not, for example, tell ISPs to stop collecting and selling sensitive user data, so long as these companies are disclosing the practice in their fine print. That means we must rely on ISPs promising to play nice. 
 
 In most of the country, thanks to the history of cable, broadband providers are a local monopoly. Several reports over the years have shown ghat for the majority of is, competition is nonexistent. 
 
 That leads to an environment where prices get higher and customer service gets worse, because there’s basically nothing you can do about it; you’re a captive audience. Customers are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with their internet providers, consistently ranking them worst among any industry. 
 
 With that as the backdrop, it’s very easy to be skeptical that any voluntary promise is even worth the pixels it’s printed with — because companies break their promises all the time. 
 
 Stripping ISPs of their common carrier classification would make it the FTC’s job, not the FCC’s, to make sure that the ISPs do what they’re going to say — but there’s a big catch there. 
 
 The FTC can only step in if companies are doing something anticompetitive or if they say one thing but then do another, basically. If, absent net neutrality, Comcast or AT&T were to change their terms of service to say something like, “All use of Netflix instead of our proprietary video service will incur you a $1/month additional ‘network usage’ fee, otherwise we throttle it to 768 Kbps” then they’d be in the clear to charge you that fee or throttle your connection. It would only be if they didn’t first disclose their intention that the FTC would bust them. 
 
 Companies can, and do, change their terms of service and customer agreements all the time. If you’re lucky, you get notice and the policy is comprehensible. If not, it happens on the sly. Without a law, there is absolutely nothing to prevent companies from changing their terms and creating fast lanes and additional access fees down the line when people aren’t paying attention. 
 
 What Happens Now 
 
 “From a political standpoint, there is no question that the easiest path would be to do nothing,” Pai said. “Leave Title II alone and move on to other issues.” 
 
 He’s definitely right about that. Alas, we have no such luck; Pai is apparently not interested in the easy path. So now, the fight begins again. 
 
 He’s releasing the full text of the NPRM and NOI — the proposed rule and the open questions the Commission’s asking — on April 27, for the FCC to vote whether or not to consider it in the Commission’s open meeting on May 18. 
 
 If the FCC votes to consider the NPRM and NOI, that will kick off a months-long comment process where the public — which includes advocacy groups, businesses, individuals, and anyone else you can think of — gets to start having its say. 
 
 The battle lines are already drawn, and they look a lot like they did in 2014. In favor of doing away with the Open Internet Rule are ISPs and the organizations that lobby for their interests — AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and groups like USTelecom and the NCTA (now called the Internet & Television Association). 
 
 The folks asking the FCC to just leave well enough alone, meanwhile, are a wide swath of tech companies and consumer advocates. The big internet companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Reddit, and Twitter started asking Pai to leave net neutrality alone a couple of weeks ago. 
 
 They’re joined today by another chorus of companies: Tech advocacy group Engine sent the FCC a letter in support of net neutrality signed by more than 800 internet businesses from all 50 states. Many are small, niche companies or new entrants you probably haven’t heard of — and that are relying on an open internet to start and grow their businesses. The list also includes several companies that were once tiny and scrappy and that successfully used the open internet to make their now-widely-known businesses grow, including: Etsy, Medium, Meetup, NextDoor, Patreon, Reddit, and Warby Parker. 
 
 Our colleagues down the hall at Consumers Union (the policy and mobilization arm of Consumerist’s parent company, Consumer Reports) had strong words for Pai. 
 
 “Doing away with net neutrality rules could ultimately mean doing away with the internet as we know it,” said senior policy counsel Jonathan Schwantes. 
 
 “Net neutrality rules keep the internet open for all and ensure consumers can access the websites and apps they – not their internet service provider – choose. Rather than leveling the playing field to spur competition and innovation, Chairman Pai’s proposal would allow a select few corporations to choose winners and losers.” 
 
 “The only way to ensure that all content is treated equally is to keep the the internet classified as a public utility,” Schwantes continued. “In this digital age, where individuals and businesses rely on the internet every day, it should no longer even be a question. Voluntary commitments from broadband providers to adhere to net neutrality ‘principles’ are simply not a substitute — especially when there would be no cop left on the beat with the authority to ensure providers stick to their promises.” 
 
 He added “millions of consumers voiced their support for net neutrality rules” the first time around, which is true. The Commission had to extend the public comment deadline after a surge of interest crashed its aging online system. In the end, about four million people commented on the net neutrality proceeding — a record-smashing number. 
 
 Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says that gutting the neutrality rules jeopardizes “core protections for online free speech and competition.” 
 
 “Ending net neutrality would be a body blow to the open dialogue upon which successful self-government depends,” adds Copps, now a special advisor to Common Cause. “It would be a red light for democracy and a green light for cable and telecom giants to control where we go and what we do on the internet.” 
 
 Weeks ago, when Pai first set his sights on net neutrality, lawmakers started promising that a second net neutrality fight would make the first one look “minuscule” in comparison. It seems it is time to start fighting that fight. 
 
 You can read Pai’s full remarks here: PDF.
– Yesterday was the day net neutrality died, with a court ruling that Internet service providers aren't bound by FCC non-discrimination rules—so they can prioritize some traffic over others. The decision may mean major changes for the everyday user, and today, media sites are offering the details. Among their warnings: The Wall Street Journal reports that the decision could have a huge impact on sites like Netflix and YouTube, whose video services hog a lot of bandwidth (they account for 32% and 19% of peak web traffic, respectively). If ISPs start making Netflix, for instance, pay a usage fee to maintain speedy content delivery, that cost could make a serious dent in its profits—or trickle down to consumers. ISPs could charge sites big fees in exchange for faster content delivery, potentially giving giants who can pay, like Amazon, a big leg up over independent retailers—not to mention other small businesses, the Huffington Post notes. Providers might even go so far as to prioritize traffic to partner sites—Time Warner might push CNN, for example. Another anti-competitive fear, via BuzzFeed: Big companies might start paying your data fees for the use of their sites. That might sound good—free data?—but it would mean that companies with the ability to pay would have a major advantage over start-ups in winning users. As BuzzFeed points out, "If, in this future, you're choosing between two streaming music services, and one of them pays for your data, there's a very good chance you’re going to pick that one." Beyond concerns over fees, there are worries that providers could block certain websites completely: Comcast users could theoretically end up with no access to, say, Netflix or Vonage, writes Troy Wolverton in the San Jose Mercury News. But net neutrality, in some form, may live to see another day, the Journal notes, reporting that the ruling "left open the door for the FCC to craft rules in a different form that might accomplish its earlier intentions."