Fueling the Fight for Net Neutrality

Idea

Everyone should have equal access to the internet, and providers shouldn’t be able to discriminate or charge different prices for different content or because of the way the user connects.

Incubation

Tim Wu first coined the term “net neutrality” in 2003, later popularizing it in his 2010 book The Master Switch, which he wrote while on a New America fellowship. Once it was in the lexicon, New America embraced the concept as a motivating ideal of the Open Technology Institute (OTI), formed in 2009. The principle of openness—supporting access to an open internet, open spectrum, and open data—has always been important to OTI.

Impact

OTI’s years-long effort to bring federal law in line with the notion of net neutrality saw an important victory in 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission adopted the strongest net neutrality protections in American history. OTI was instrumental in securing and defending those rules, filing hundreds of pages of comments with the FCC and helping the FCC successfully defend the rules from immediate attacks in court. In 2017, the FCC, under new leadership, repealed the rules, shifting OTI’s work to an all-out defensive fight to save net neutrality in the courts, in Congress, and in the states, including California, which recently passed SB. 822—the nation’s strongest net neutrality law—to fill the gap left by the federal level repeal.