Net Neutrality in 2026: What the Rules Actually Say Now

Net neutrality has been reversed, restored, and reversed again enough times over the past decade that it's genuinely reasonable to lose track of where the rules currently stand. What makes the most recent reversal worth understanding in detail, rather than filing away as "still unsettled, as usual," is that it didn't happen the way the previous ones did. The 2017 repeal was a policy choice by a newly appointed FCC chair. The January 2025 reversal wasn't a policy choice at all — it was a federal court concluding the FCC never had the legal authority to make these rules in the first place, using a legal tool the Supreme Court had handed courts only seven months earlier, in a case that had nothing to do with the internet.

Three Flips Before This One

The regulatory history here is worth having straight, because each reversal changed the legal classification of broadband internet access service under a specific provision of the Communications Act of 1934, and that classification is the entire fight. In 2015, the FCC under chairman Tom Wheeler reclassified broadband as a "telecommunications service" under Title II of the Act — the same category historically used for traditional phone service — a classification that gave the agency real authority to impose the bright-line rules most people associate with net neutrality: no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization. In late 2017, the FCC under chairman Ajit Pai reversed this, reclassifying broadband as a lightly regulated "information service" and repealing the 2015 rules through an order titled, with some rhetorical flourish, "Restoring Internet Freedom." In April 2024, the FCC under chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel flipped it back again, restoring the Title II classification and reimposing the 2015-era rules through a new order.

The Supreme Court Case That Wasn't About the Internet

Here's where the 2024 order ran into something none of the earlier flips had to contend with. In June 2024, the Supreme Court decided Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo — a case about a federal requirement that herring fishing boats pay for at-sea monitors, with no connection to telecommunications policy at all. What made Loper Bright consequential far beyond fishing regulation was that it overturned the Chevron doctrine, a foundational principle of administrative law dating to 1984 under which courts were required to defer to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute it was charged with administering. Whether broadband internet counts as a "telecommunications service" or an "information service" under the 1934 Act's decades-old language is exactly the kind of genuinely ambiguous statutory question Chevron deference used to resolve in the agency's favor, as long as the agency's reading was reasonable.

On January 2, 2025, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals applied Loper Bright directly to the FCC's 2024 net neutrality order, and the difference this made was decisive. Rather than asking whether the FCC's classification of broadband as a telecommunications service was a reasonable reading of ambiguous statutory language — the old Chevron question, which the FCC had won under this exact framework before — the court now had to decide for itself, with no deference to the agency at all, what the correct classification actually was. It concluded broadband is properly classified as an information service, vacating the FCC's 2024 order in full. It's a genuinely striking piece of legal cause-and-effect: the substantive policy argument for net neutrality didn't change at all between April 2024 and January 2025. What changed was a completely unrelated Supreme Court ruling about fishing boat monitors, which removed the specific legal deference the FCC's classification had relied on to survive judicial review in the past.

Where That Actually Leaves Federal Policy

The practical result, as of the most recent ruling, is that broadband is back under Title I — the lighter regulatory classification — and the FCC currently lacks the authority to enforce blocking, throttling, or paid-prioritization rules at the federal level the way the 2015 and 2024 orders both attempted. This isn't a temporary gap awaiting the next administration's policy preference the way the 2017-to-2024 gap was; it's a court ruling on what the FCC's actual statutory authority permits, which means restoring federal net neutrality rules going forward would most plausibly require new legislation from Congress explicitly granting that authority, rather than simply a future FCC issuing another reclassification order that a court could vacate on the same grounds a second time.

Why California's Law Survived Anyway

This is where the story has a genuinely counterintuitive turn worth knowing, because it involves the same underlying legal mechanics working in the opposite direction. California passed its own state-level net neutrality law, SB-822, in September 2018, codifying rules functionally similar to the FCC's 2015 order specifically for broadband service provided to California customers. Industry groups challenged it, arguing federal law preempted California from regulating broadband at all. On January 28, 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that challenge in ACA Connects v. Bonta, and the court's reasoning turned on the FCC's own 2017 choice: because the FCC had reclassified broadband as an information service and thereby given up its own authority to regulate net neutrality directly, it had also given up the specific legal authority it would have needed to preempt a state from regulating in that same space. In other words, the FCC's own decision to deregulate broadband is what left room for California to regulate it instead — the exact same reclassification that stripped the federal government of net neutrality authority is what protected the state's authority to fill the gap. That Ninth Circuit ruling is binding precedent covering Washington and Oregon as well, both of which have their own net neutrality statutes, and Colorado and Vermont have comparable laws in effect too — meaning five states currently maintain enforceable net neutrality protections for their residents' broadband service regardless of what's true federally.

What This Actually Means If You Don't Live in One of Those Five States

For a broadband subscriber outside California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, or Vermont, the honest current answer is that no enforceable legal rule currently prevents an internet service provider from blocking, throttling, or charging for prioritized access to specific content or services, beyond whatever competitive and reputational pressure exists in a given local market. It's worth being precise that this is a description of the current legal floor, not a claim about what ISPs are actually doing in practice day to day — providers have generally avoided the most visible, consumer-facing forms of blocking and throttling even during the periods when no federal rule technically prohibited it, in part because doing so risks exactly the kind of public and legislative backlash that produced the original 2015 rules in the first place. But "providers have mostly chosen not to" and "providers are legally required not to" are different statements, and as of the Sixth Circuit's January 2025 ruling, only the first one is currently true at the federal level — the second is true only for residents of the five states that took the separate step of writing their own version of these protections into state law.