March 14, 2002: Under the leadership of Republican-appointed chairman Michael Powell, the FCC reclassifies internet access provided over cable wires as an “information service.”
June 2002: Tim Wu coins the term network neutrality in a short policy memo. The following year, Wu expands on this concept in his seminal work “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,” Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law 2 (2003): 23–68.
October 6, 2003: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that cable companies (like Comcast and Time Warner) are required to sell access to their networks to independent ISPs (like Earthlink and Brand X).
June 27, 2005: The Supreme Court decides in favor of ISPs in the case of National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services. The ruling effectively ends open access, a policy that forced telephone monopolies to lease their lines to independent ISPs.
February 2007: Robb Topolski, a former software quality engineer at Intel, discovers that Comcast is blocking and throttling traffic to the peer-to-peer file-sharing client BitTorrent.
August 1, 2008: The FCC sanctions Comcast for blocking and throttling traffic to BitTorrent, marking the first time that a broadband provider is reprimanded by the FCC for violating net neutrality.
April 6, 2010: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court finds that the FCC does not have the regulatory authority to enforce net neutrality.
December 21, 2010: The FCC issues the Open Internet Order preventing ISPs from blocking or slowing down consumer access to content on the internet, but leaving open the possibility that ISPs could create fast lanes for certain content providers.
January 14, 2014: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court throws out most of the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order on narrow jurisdictional grounds.
February 26, 2015: Led by Chairman Tom Wheeler, the FCC votes to institute strong net neutrality protections by reclassifying broadband internet as a Title II telecommunications service.
June 14, 2016: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court upholds the new Open Internet Order.
December 4, 2017: Under the chairmanship of Ajit Pai, the FCC votes to approve the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, which rolls back the net neutrality regulations that were put in place by the FCC in 2015.