
The beginning of the most fraught debate on government regulation in 2017 happened 14 years earlier when a young law school professor named Tim Wu wrote that net neutrality would “preserv[e] a Darwinian competition among every conceivable use of the Internet so that the [sic] only the best survive.” Not exactly a rallying cry against the free market, and while the issue was hotly debated among legal academics, its first attempt to become law in the United States failed miserably. Net neutrality would not be manifested in the law until 2010 with the passage of boletín 4915 in Chile.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski, with a Democratic executive branch, decided to follow Chile’s lead despite the threat of Congress pushing back and enacted the FCC Open Internet Order on December 21st, 2010. This order was not net neutrality, at least in the eyes of the policy’s advocates, but it enraged the Republican Party. And on April Fool’s Day, Joshua D. Wright published a post titled “Welcome To Net Neutrality” on a blog called “Truth on the Market.”