How President Obama helped reshape Internet rules

Days after a crushing midterm defeat in which Democrats lost their Senate majority, President Barack Obama released a video that endeared him to Silicon Valley and millions of internet activists. The video, released while President Obama was traveling in Asia, made the case for the Federal Communications Commission to adopt the strongest possible rules to ensure a free Internet.

President Obama said regulators needed to take steps to prevent broadband companies from slowing down or even blocking content. He also rejected calls for a “fast lane” that would have allowed some content providers to pay for faster speeds. It was a crucial moment in the fight for net neutrality and a pivotal one for President Obama, who showed that even after a second midterm shellacking, he wasn’t done taking action. Twenty months later, those rules received a major validation when the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld them entirely. The decision ensures that President Obama will go down in history as solidifying some of the strongest US regulations written to police the conduct of internet service providers.

“Historians will do the measuring,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), an early proponent of the strong rules. “I’m saying that it is part of his legacy. This is the most transformative tool in the history of our country. And he understood what it represented and what was needed to keep it that way.”

It won’t end the controversy surrounding those actions, however.