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Net neutrality, the early days

Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest change in communications law since the 1930s. The law maintained the basic/enhanced dichotomy, but it renamed its two parts. Basic services became telecommunications services; enhanced services became information services.

Now, into which of these two categories does the Internet fall? The FCC regards the World Wide Web--the entire apparatus of browsers and HTML files, the layers upon layers of computation and presentation--as an information service (i.e., an enhanced service). It would make sense, then, that the wires through which this information service traveled were regarded as a telecommunications service (i.e., a basic service). Indeed, when most people accessed the web through phone wires with a dial-up modem, the agency did categorize phone lines as a telecommunications service--because it regarded all phone lines that way.

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