Imagine a world where Comcast slows video streaming from Fox News's website to a pixelated crawl while boosting Rachel Maddow—who happens to star on Comcast-owned MSNBC. What if Verizon, which owns the liberal Huffington Post, charged you more to visit right-wing Breitbart. Or maybe Google Fiber bans access to the alt-right social network Gab.

Today, it's illegal to impose tiered pricing on any internet content, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. But if Republicans have their way, those rules will soon disappear, leaving companies like Comcast and Verizon free to block, throttle, or charge a toll to access your favorite websites and apps.

The principle of net neutrality asserts that internet service providers should treat all internet traffic the same way, regardless of a site's content or owner—or its politics. Under the FCC's net neutrality rules, your cell phone carrier can't stop you from using Skype on your data plan. Your home broadband provider can't slow Netflix to a crawl. And neither can stop you from visiting all the conservative websites you want.

Broadband providers probably wouldn't openly discriminate against content on a purely political basis. After all, that wouldn't be politic. But most of them already favor their own content in one way or another, thanks to loopholes in the existing rules. And that should worry the very conservatives actively seeking to dismantle net neutrality now that a Democratic president no longer stands in their way.

To appreciate just how partisan net neutrality has become, look no farther than Ted Cruz. This past week, he once again called the FCC's rules "Obamacare for the Internet."

President Trump, whose rise to power the internet largely facilitated, takes his own issue with net neutrality, sticking to a now-popular conservative talking point against the principle. "Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine," Donald Trump tweeted in 2014. "Will target conservative media."

But equating the two gets both wrong. The FCC adopted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949 to require that broadcasters present both sides of news stories. The end of that rule in 1987 enabled the rise of right-wing talk radio shows such as the The Rush Limbaugh Show. But unlike the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC's net neutrality rules don't dictate what content websites or apps can or can't publish. Quite the opposite: Instead of insisting that carriers include specific points of view, it bans them from excluding any legal content subscribers may wish to access. Net neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine are comparable only because of their FCC origins. But the "neutrality" of "net neutrality" hardly requires a politically neutral point of view.

Yes, conservatives also make more traditional laissez-faire fiscal arguments against net neutrality. They worry the FCC's rules will limit the number of ways that telcos can make money, which could drive up internet prices and reduce investment in infrastructure to make the internet better. "The internet has flourished because it is an environment free of meddlesome and burdensome regulation," Cruz said during last week's Senate hearing.

Permission-less Innovation

But the internet is more than just access providers. It's also the live streams and news apps, social networks and podcasts to which the internet provides access. The internet has flourished in large part because the entrepreneurs behind these sites and services could innovate without seeking permission from internet service providers. Once you build your website or app and put it online, anyone with internet access can reach it. You don't have to cut a separate deal with each and every internet access provider in the country.

That model is already under threat today, even under current rules. Most major wireless carriers already allow certain apps and sites to bypass subscribers' data limits—a process called "zero rating." Verizon and AT&T both zero-rate their own video streaming services while allowing other companies to pay to have their content zero-rated. T-Mobile, meanwhile, allows select music and video-streaming companies to zero-rate their offerings for free. Now let's say you're an entrepreneur who just launched a new video streaming service. You want to be the next Neflix, but to be competitive, you have to strike zero-rating deals with each carrier. Even if you have the money, it erects a barrier to entry. So much for permission-less innovation.

Conservatives didn’t always oppose net neutrality.

The FCC's net neutrality rules don't explicitly ban zero-rating, but the practice offers some insight into the ways that broadband providers can create obstacles that advantage some media companies over others. Suddenly the idea of content unable to break through because of deals struck on the side starts to seem less unlikely.

Conservatives didn't always oppose net neutrality. In 2005, the Republican-led FCC approved a policy statement vowing to protect consumers' ability to access any legal internet content without interference from broadband providers. In 2008, the GOP-led commission ordered Comcast to stop discriminating against BitTorrent traffic on its network. Many conservative critics couch their net neutrality criticism in objections to the FCC's 2015 reclassification of broadband providers as de facto utilities, a decision that gave the agency the legal authority to impose net neutrality rules, saying it was a power grab by the agency. But back in 2002, the late arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that broadband should have been considered a common carrier all along.

So what's changed? For one thing, the telco industry has stepped up its lobbying spending since the early 2000s. But the shift also reflects the broader polarization of US politics. Both the FCC and Congress have become more polarized in recent years. President Obama favored net neutrality, which means conservatives have to oppose it. But just as the backlash against plans to repeal Obamacare itself have shown, Republicans may find trying to unwind net neutrality less popular than they think. Americans tend to see internet access as an extension of their First Amendment freedoms—they can say and see what they want online. If they have to start paying more for one kind of political speech over another, they likely won't stay neutral at all.