When Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, announced his intention to roll back Obama-era net-neutrality guidelines, gutting rules that prevent Internet service providers from charging companies for faster access or from slowing down or speeding up services like Netflix or YouTube, he was quick to claim that critics of his plan—Internet freedom groups and smaller Internet companies that can’t afford so-called “fast lanes”—were overreacting. “They greatly overstate the fears about what the Internet will look like going forward,” Pai said on Fox & Friends. Pai’s proposal, which would put in place a voluntary system reliant on written promises from I.S.P.s not to stall competitors’ traffic or block Web sites, essentially serves as a road map to radically reshape the Internet. But like Pai, I.S.P.s and others in the telecom industry have curiously insisted that consumers and smaller companies have nothing to fear when it comes to net-neutrality reform.

The most recent example of this blatant hush-hushing comes in the form of an op-ed entitled “Let’s calm down. No matter what happens with net neutrality, an open Internet isn’t going anywhere,” published on Recode the day before the F.C.C.’s net-neutrality vote and written by Michael Powell, president and C.E.O. of the N.C.T.A., one of the largest telecom trade association groups in the U.S. Powell repeats Pai’s claims that critics of a net-neutrality rollback are being hysterical, and that actually, a rollback wouldn’t harm the open Internet at all because “I.S.P.s highly value the open Internet and the principles of net neutrality, much more than some animated activists would have you think.” (Powell has supported such user-friendly measures as I.S.P.s increasing their use of data caps on consumers and the N.C.T.A. spending more than $13 million on political lobbying in 2016.)

I.S.P.s themselves have written over and over again this year about how consumers shouldn’t fear the abolition of net neutrality, claiming that they can and will self-regulate in the absence of government oversight. AT&T, whose former chief executive officer famously threatened to make Internet companies pay to reach AT&T customers, published a tome from its top lobbyist, Bob Quinn, last month, in which Quinn said, more or less, that everyone should calm down because AT&T will stick to its word. “AT&T intends to operate its network the same way AT&T operates its network today: in an open and transparent manner. We will not block Web sites, we will not throttle or degrade Internet traffic based on content, and we will not unfairly discriminate in our treatment of Internet traffic (all consistent with the rules that were adopted—and that we supported—in 2010, and the rules in place today),” he wrote. “These commitments are laid out in the broadband details section of AT&T’s main Web site. They represent a guarantee to our customers that we will provide service in an open and transparent way. They have been, and will continue to be, enforceable commitments. We will not remove that language and we will continue to update any changes we make to our network management practices.”

Comcast is singing a similar tune. “As we have said previously, this proposal is not the end of net-neutrality rules,” David Cohen, Comcast’s chief lobbyist and chief diversity officer, wrote this year. “With the F.C.C. transparency requirement and the restoration of the F.T.C.‘s role in overseeing information services, the agencies together will have the authority to take action against any I.S.P. which does not make its open Internet practices clearly known to consumers, and if needed enforce against any anti-competitive or deceptive practices. Comcast has already made net-neutrality promises to our customers, and we will continue to follow those standards, regardless of the regulations in place.”