As the home of the largest telecom businesses and thousands of digital companies, the United States has historically favored less regulation when it comes to the internet. For that reason, internet service was, up until 2015, classified as Title I information service, an FCC category that allows such services to only be lightly regulated.

Net neutrality isn’t just about maintaining good consumer experiences: It’s about a set of principles under which the conditions for online innovation and freedom are maintained.

But over the years, there were what net neutrality proponents felt were significant examples of internet service providers using this free rein unfairly. When Apple released Facetime, for example, AT&T didn’t let consumers use it unless they were on Wi-Fi. AT&T also imposed secret data caps from 2011-2014, while Comcast included hidden fees. These had to be undone retroactively, through litigation by consumer advocates. Perhaps more significantly, though, as services like YouTube and Netflix started to take up huge amounts of bandwidth in the past decade—sometimes, nearly half of all U.S. internet traffic—providers began talking about so-called “fast lanes” that would ask those companies to pay to maintain smooth delivery of their service.

It’s this latter point that most clearly gets to the core of net neutrality. While the AT&T-Facetime example was eventually corrected, what a fast lane policy does is give an implicit advantage to those huge companies who have resources and clout, both to pay and to negotiate a better deal. These are barriers that newer, smaller sites would find prohibitive. In this way, net neutrality isn’t really about your ISP slowing down Netflix—these days, that would annoy so many customers that providers know it would be bad business—but rather, it’s a threat to the next Netflix. How does anyone compete with huge multinationals who can pay for their customers to have a better experience? And the practice could further privilege content that reflects the views of the powerful: It is not difficult to imagine, for example, a small progressive media site being delivered more slowly than a Fox News video stream. How do individuals resist when already entrenched incumbents are given priority in our digital public space? Net neutrality isn’t just about maintaining good consumer experiences: It’s about a set of principles under which the conditions for online innovation and freedom are maintained.

This was the view of Obama administration’s FCC chair, Tom Wheeler—or at least it became his view, after a huge public outcry in defense of net neutrality during Obama’s second term. But the FCC’s policies also shifted towards neutrality in those years in response to the agency’s own battles with Verizon and other large telecom companies. In those fights, the providers claimed that the FCC’s attempts to regulate them went beyond what the agency had the power to demand of Title I regulated companies.And so the FCC changed the classification. In June 2015, the agency published a new set of guidelines for telecommunications that reclassified internet service providers as Title II common carriers.

Title II is a very different kind of regulatory classification. Opponents of net neutrality like to refer to Title II as a set of Depression-era rules designed for railroads and telephone monopolies. But in principle, what Title II actually allows for is the idea that any company that ends up functioning like infrastructure to move things across the country—and in the case of the internet, what these companies move is information—has to do so in the public interest. When the internet began to be regulated this way, it reflected the growing consensus that the internet is a utility that must treat the delivery of its services neutrally, like a company delivering electricity or water to retail customers. The reclassification of internet providers under Title II was thus a huge win for net neutrality advocates.