For years, the federal government supported the principle of net neutrality: the idea that broadband providers should treat all Internet traffic the same. Verizon and Comcast, for example, shouldn’t be able to block you from accessing sites that they consider competitive or threatening, and they shouldn’t be able to accelerate your access to sites that have paid them. But the legal authority supporting these rules was flawed, and last January a federal court struck them down.

Following the ruling, it seemed unlikely that the regulations would be replaced with a strong, or “battleship,” net-neutrality law. Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, or F.C.C., was said to be the cable companies’ man, and his first proposal was not very promising. It would have allowed for so-called slow lanes, giving cable companies the right to de-prioritize the speed of some Web sites in favor of others. Additionally, the Obama Administration hadn’t shown much willingness to argue with people who claimed, however speciously, that new laws would cause stocks to plummet. And nearly everyone agreed that companies like Comcast and A. T. & T., some of the largest donors in Washington, had long ago bought off Congress and maybe the F.C.C. as well.

But, on Wednesday, Wheeler confessed to a change of heart. It was a Nixon-goes-to-China moment. He wrote, in Wired magazine, “Originally, I believed that the FCC could assure Internet openness through a determination of ‘commercial reasonableness.’ ” But, he said, he had come to fear that a weak rule would “be interpreted to mean what is reasonable for commercial interests, not consumers.” Instead, he continued, “I am submitting to my colleagues the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.” With those words, Tom Wheeler became a net-neutrality hero.

How exactly did this come to be? Whatever opponents may think, there is no conspiracy; there was no shady or powerful actor pushing for this outcome. In fact, large companies like Google and Facebook, which favor net neutrality, decided to sit on their hands. And while startups, which have the most to lose because they’re likely to end up in slow lanes, did make strong net neutrality their cause, they have little influence in Washington. The real reason for the shift was something occasionally happens in a democracy: enough of the population caught wind of what was going on and said they didn’t like it. And then the chairman of the F.C.C. and the President noticed. All of which his begs another question: The public doesn’t usually react so passionately to telecom rules—what caused so many people to care about this particular issue?

For one thing, net neutrality, particularly when cast as the prospect of “Internet slow lanes” tapped into strong anxieties about inequality. Would the Internet become dominated by just a handful of wealthy companies that could afford to pay for fast connections to users? The link between financial inequality and net neutrality reached the President. And so, in November, when he finally demanded a strong net-neutrality rule, he framed his argument as way of allowing for a fair fight between large and small, rich and poor: “An entrepreneur’s fledgling company should have the same chance to succeed as established corporations,” he said. “Access to a high-school student’s blog shouldn't be unfairly slowed down to make way for advertisers with more money.”

Polls show that more than three-quarters of Americans don’t like the idea of slow lanes for certain online content. The idea that the Internet would be tiered like so much else—for instance, boarding an airplane—is appealing to few people other than those who run cable companies. Citizens may not have much faith in the government, but it’s clear that they have even less faith in the companies that provide broadband.

It is also true that open Internet, though far from perfect, has come to represent a somewhat unpredictable and exciting frontier, a place where people can invent and explore new things. The cable companies, by demanding the right to control access, seemed to want to block off that frontier. For the past ten years, the cable-and-telephone industry has been saying that it needs fast lanes to help technology evolve. But the Internet continued to progress despite the absence of fast lanes. Net neutrality, the de-facto rule, seemed to be working, and the industry’s demands for fast lanes became a solution looking for a problem.

All of these factors, in some combination, managed to convince the public, and then President Obama and the chairman of the F.C.C., that net neutrality was important. And there’s a lesson to be learned here: the equalitarian instinct reflected in the campaign to protect net neutrality doesn’t seem likely to just go away, and it may not bode well for some of the largest Internet firms, like Facebook and Amazon, should they be perceived as straying too far from the ideals of openness and egalitarianism.

Of course, balls can be intercepted on the one-yard line. There will be a last-minute lobbying effort against Wheeler’s proposal. Congress could also overrule him, and, of course, in an age in which suing agencies has become a corporate reflex, someone will likely ask the courts to overturn his handiwork. But, barring any surprises, Wheeler’s strong version of net neutrality will soon be the law of the land. And that is something that our democracy can be proud of.