You may have noticed that Ars looks a bit different today. We're standing in solidarity with the Internet's "Day of Action," in which thousands of companies and websites are protesting plans by the US Federal Communications Commission to dismantle Obama-era net neutrality rules.

We hope it doesn't happen—and that the FCC doesn't give corporate America even more control over something on which our daily lives now depend. But stopping it now will require some major public pressure.

To explain how the current rules work, Ars Senior IT Reporter Jon Brodkin today takes us on a deep-dive into net neutrality and the current "Title II authority" behind the rules. If FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed by President Donald Trump, revokes the rules, as he says he will, "Title II provisions related to broadband network construction, universal service, competition, network interconnection, and Internet access for disabled people would no longer apply."

Brodkin also notes that the FCC could wipe out consumer protection under current net neutrality rules "that outlaw blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization" of traffic. That's not the future we need.

Resistance is not futile

Many Ars readers are already familiar with the ideas behind net neutrality and with the importance of an open Internet. That is why we're asking our readers to get the word out—to inform others who might not be as familiar with the issue—that plenty is at stake. We've assembled some of our most informative work on the topic of net neutrality here for easy sharing.

And to help further stress the importance of net neutrality, here are a few scenarios, each perfectly plausible or already happening, that might be possible if ISPs give up on the attempt to be neutral Internet providers:

Perhaps you'll one day have to pay your Internet overlords for Ars—or your second-favorite website—content to render quickly. (Or perhaps the sites themselves will need to pay.) Pay up or the site will remain slow. A slow-rendering Ars might push our readers to competing sites that have either ponied up for fast-lane service or didn't need to pay because they were granted free fast-lane access (often called "zero rating") as part of some business deal.

Perhaps YouTube and Vimeo will count against your data cap—while an ISP's own "preferred" video service won't. (This sort of thing is already common on mobile connections.)

Perhaps your ISP, under pressure from various industries, simply begins blocking various websites—say, a file-sharing website that some people use for piracy but which you use to share multitrack mixes with your band. Is that a decision you want an ISP to be making?

Perhaps you'll have trouble watching your favorite video service. Maybe not because your ISP has "blocked" it, but because your ISP limits streaming video bandwidth within its network... which might just happen to benefit its legacy cable TV or IPTV system. (Netflix is so big and has so much leverage that this is not a major worry for the company—but what about the next Netflix?

Perhaps your ISP will throttle the high-bandwidth BitTorrent file-sharing protocol—or whatever replaces it. (Remember the Comcast BitTorrent debacle that resulted in Comcast paying $16 million?) Or maybe your ISP will just charge you extra to use it.

Perhaps you'll be bombarded with javascript-injected advertisements overlaid onto Web pages—ads put there by the ISPs. ISPs are already doing this, to some extent, with Internet service doled out for free at coffee houses and airports. And some small ISPs have tried it with home Internet service.

Under current net neutrality rules, ISPs must generally deliver broadband service without blocking or throttling certain content, and without prioritizing other content in exchange for payment from websites. Absent net neutrality protections, however, we suspect this restraint won't last, especially in areas with little real competition. The experiments in messing with your Internet connection will be subtle at first, but absent massive consumer backlash, will certainly gather steam.

Net neutrality rules may not be perfect—but the ideas behind them matter. Simply gutting the rules altogether is the wrong way forward for Internet policy in America.

What can you do? Educate others—and speak out yourself. Comments are being taken by the FCC at this link. Click "Express" to write a comment directly into the FCC form, or click "New Filing" to upload documents. And let your senators and congresspeople know that you care about the issue.