The Internet Before Free
In June 2006, the House Commerce Committee advanced the COPE Act without net neutrality provisions. Telecommunications companies had been arguing that the internet should work like cable television: tiered access, priority lanes, the ability to charge websites for the privilege of reaching users at full speed.
Congress mostly agreed.
Senator Markey's office published a fact sheet distinguishing between what net neutrality actually meant and what the telecom industry claimed it meant. The SaveTheInternet coalition formed, pulling together technology companies, advocacy organizations, and ordinary internet users who had noticed that "communications opportunity" for AT&T didn't necessarily mean the same thing as communications opportunity for them.
The COPE Act didn't pass the Senate in that form. Net neutrality survived the 2006 fight. Then it came back in 2010 under a different name. Then again in 2015, with the FCC's Open Internet Order. Then the FCC reversed it in 2017. Then a federal court upheld the reversal. Then the FCC tried to restore it in 2024. Then a different court ruled the FCC didn't have the authority it thought it had.
Eighteen years of the same argument. The same coalitions. The same talking points. The fight never ends; it just changes venues.
What's striking about the 2006 moment, viewed from now, is how early the telecom industry's intent was visible. The iPhone didn't exist yet. YouTube had been running for a year. Netflix was still mailing DVDs. The dominant form of social media was MySpace. And yet the telecommunications industry could already see what was coming on top of their pipes, and they wanted structural control over it before it arrived.
Senator Markey's fact sheet reads almost identically to the arguments from 2015, 2017, and 2024. The industry's position — we built the infrastructure, we should control what flows through it — hasn't changed. The vocabulary has been updated for each regulatory cycle. The argument is the same argument.
The internet we got was shaped by those 2006 votes. The one we almost got would have looked different. Whether different meant better is genuinely unclear — the open internet we preserved has its own catastrophic failure modes: surveillance capitalism, algorithmic radicalization, platform monopolization. The pay-to-play version would have had different catastrophic failure modes. The choice was never between a good internet and a bad one.
It was between who gets to impose their dysfunction on the network: the people who own the pipes, or the people who build things on top of them.
In 2006, the builders barely held the line. They've been holding it, losing it, and holding it again ever since.
Seeded from
Senator Markey press release; Wikipedia net neutrality history — House Commerce Committee advances COPE Act without net neutrality provisions June 2006; SaveTheInternet coalition forms across tech industry and civil society
Net Neutrality: Fact v. FictionFurther reading
- Wikipedia — Net Neutrality in the United States
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