I remember the first time I ever heard about net neutrality. It was around 2004 or 2005, and when the full idea was explained to me — hey, let’s prevent phone and cable companies from influencing the content we see online — I was surprised there was even a fight about the idea.

It seemed obvious that the internet’s great promise was that it operated outside the purview of existing communications monopolies. Because phone and cable companies couldn’t easily dictate what happened online, the internet was exploding in dozens of genuinely new ideas. Among those back then were blogs, Skype, file-sharing, YouTube, Friendster, Netflix — ideas that scrambled our sense of what was possible in media and communication, and, in the process, posed existential threats to the established giants.

Other than the phone and cable companies themselves, I couldn’t see why anyone might oppose the simple premise of protecting the environment that had made all these things possible. Did they hate clean water, too?