The first 100 days of President Donald Trump's administration come to a close Saturday. By any account, this presidential honeymoon of sorts was a mixed bag. The 45th president's biggest achievement was the confirmation to the Supreme Court of Neil Gorsuch. His biggest defeat was the failure to live up to a campaign promise to get Congress to repeal Obamacare—officially known as the Affordable Care Act. "We couldn't quite get there. We're just a very small number of votes short in terms of getting our bill passed," the president said. And throughout it all, the administration's first three months, which ended with the lowest public approval rating of any new president at this stage, remained clouded in political turmoil, largely because the FBI is investigating whether Trump's presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government.

The current administration will claim several crowning achievements that fall somewhere in between the president's Supreme Court victory and his healthcare reform defeat. These achievements—or setbacks, depending on your political leanings—run the gamut when it comes to policy areas. The president's FCC appointment has pushed net neutrality to the chopping block. Online privacy took a hit as well after Trump signed legislation allowing home Internet and mobile broadband providers to sell or share Web browsing history without consent from consumers. Trump also signed legislation designed to limit federal funding for Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions. The president ordered the termination of President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, and he rolled back the Obama administration's move to require automakers to increase fuel efficiency.

"If the standards threaten auto jobs, then common sense changes could've and should've been made," Trump said about the mileage standards. And speaking of jobs, Trump also notably signed an executive order requiring a wholesale review of the H-1B visa program. That program has allowed tens of thousands of foreign tech-sector workers to come and work in the US each year.

So despite his unusual political ascent, Trump's first impressions follow the familiar path of his many predecessors. This 100-day period, with a few notable OPSEC fails along the way, has been a blend of political victories and defeats, popular and unpopular policies and appointments. When it comes to topics that matter most around Ars Technica, there has been plenty to discuss.

Online woes

What a difference a few months make. Trump, during his presidential campaign against rival Hillary Clinton, infamously said: "I love WikiLeaks." That's because the site was dumping all manner of documents about the Democratic National Committee, including documents about the party's campaign strategy.

But more recently, Trump's CIA director, Michael Pompeo, threatened the document-spilling site. He called WikiLeaks a "non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia." That comment was in reaction to WikiLeaks' recent release of all types of CIA espionage documents, including leaks about the agency's hacking tools.

The administration, believe it or not, has won some praise from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early going. Recently, the EFF applauded the FBI for obtaining a single warrant in Alaska to hack thousands of computers in a bid to free them from the global botnet, Kelihos. To win the warrant, the authorities for the first time invoked Rule 41, a section of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure revised in December. Many rights groups had feared that the government, with the new hacking authority, would abuse that power. But for the moment, those fears have been allayed.

On the other side of the privacy spectrum, however, the Trump administration demanded that Twitter reveal who controls the @ALT_uscis handle that has been critical of the president's immigration policy. The handle, now with 154,000 followers, debuted in the immediate aftermath of Trump signing his first immigration executive order. The authorities believe that this Twitter feed is run by a government employee, or employees, of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. The authorities suspect that the account is one of several so-called new "alt" Twitter feeds run by federal employees critical of the government. After Twitter protested and publicized the demands by the Customs and Border Protection agency, the administration folded (PDF). But that privacy dispute isn't over yet: the DHS inspector general is investigating whether the government abused its authority in making the demand in the first place.

Bye bye, net neutrality

Of course, no online-related political topic in 2017 has been as closely observed as net neutrality. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump appointed Republican Ajit Pai as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Pai quickly got to work on reversing the agenda of his predecessor, Democrat Tom Wheeler, by overturning some of Wheeler's regulatory decisions and weakening others.

Pai's FCC has upended an expansion of broadband subsidies for the poor, a plan to save customers money on TV set-top boxes, and inmate calling rules that place a cap on intrastate calling rates. What's more, Pai tabled a net neutrality investigation into data cap exemption fees charged by AT&T and Verizon Wireless, rules requiring ISPs to make public disclosures of hidden fees and data caps, and data security rules requiring ISPs to protect customer information from theft and data breaches.

But perhaps his biggest move came Wednesday when Pai announced he intends to reverse the FCC's previous decision to enforce net neutrality rules and to classify ISPs as common carriers. On the chopping block is an FCC net neutrality order adopted in 2015 under Wheeler's stewardship that prohibits Internet Service Providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment. The order also set up a complaint process to prevent "unjust" or "unreasonable" pricing and practices. The threat of complaints to the FCC helped put an end to several disputes between ISPs and other network operators over network interconnection payments, which improved Internet service quality for many subscribers. Comcast and other ISPs promptly celebrated the FCC chief's announcement.

Altogether, the administration's U-turn from Wheeler's FCC marks a major shift. Wheeler had argued that the FCC could promote broadband deployment without sacrificing consumer protections. With Pai at the helm, ISPs are clearly becoming the big winners.