If you care about open and fair internet access, you should be upset. The new FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, has promised to roll back net neutrality—a decisive step that rolls back the commendable actions of his predecessor. A wide variety of protests targeting this issue are on tap throughout the day.

All of this net neutrality action involves just the very last part of the communications grid in the US — the “last mile,” or the part of the network that actually touches consumers. Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler pushed through the relabeling of the “last mile” as a regulable service. That utility label needs to be retained, as I’ve often argued.

But there’s an even bigger and possibly more insidious policy in the works that will result in far greater woes for consumers. It involves the not terribly well-understood part of the system called the “middle mile.” As with the last mile, the new administration wants to avoid enforcing any legal protections. And it‘s doing this in a manner that just happens to benefit the powerful forces that take citizens’ money while denying them the best services.

Susan Crawford is a columnist for Backchannel and a professor at Harvard Law School. She is also the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

So what is this “middle mile?” Think of a small, local cul-de-sac connected to a medium-sized avenue. The high-speed internet access analog to the cul-de-sac is usually your local cable monopoly (the “last mile”), and the medium-sized avenue is the next step. From that medium-sized avenue, one can eventually connect to consumers and businesses in other cities or neighborhoods, themselves connected to many instances of the last mile. That crucial midpoint avenue — the so-called “middle mile,” or “backhaul,” “special access,” or “business data services” part of the network—is usually a monopoly as well. Often, it’s the local incumbent telephone company—either AT&T or Verizon—that controls that monopoly.

It’s easy to understand how overwhelming concentration in the ~$50 billion “middle-mile” marketplace could cause huge problems for any competition in the last mile. Any new player in the last-mile market will have to pay through the nose to actually get data anywhere useful. Result: Everyone—every business, every residence—pays indirect rent to a monopoly-controlled "middle mile" in their area. The only remedy is regulation, because the barriers to entry by competitors in many areas are simply too high.

And indeed, that “middle mile” is nominally a regulable, so-called “Title II” service, meaning that the FCC has statutory authority to ensure that this leg of the network is provided at “just and reasonable” prices. But over the years, with persistent, mostly invisible effort by the handful of companies that control it, it has been entirely deregulated as a matter of reality.

Almost five years ago, the FCC decided to really dig into this “middle-mile” market. It collected detailed pricing and availability data for every part of the country, including information about facilities, billing, revenue, and expenditures , so that it could actually act like a regulator of this crucial and broken market.

The resulting data collection order—covering all of 2013 and every part of the broadly defined midsegment of the internet access network —was carried out. Every “business data services” element, which includes both facilities between different internet access “points of presence” and every facility from a point of presence to all user locations (that aren’t consumer locations), was examined and documented.

If you have any doubt that detailed information about telecommunications can ever be gathered, rest assured that it can. This data now exists. It’s not all available to the public, but it exists. It is the most comprehensive collection of information ever assembled for an FCC rule-making proceeding.

And what did that information show? That we were being taken advantage of. Economists noted that concentration in this market was uniformly high, with the vast majority of locations served by a monopoly provider—and over 95 percent of locations served by duopoly providers at most. The Consumer Federation of America asserted that as a result of the excessive market power held by “middle mile” providers, American consumers had shelled out over $150 billion since 2010 to cover overcharges and abusive pricing.

And then something inspiring occurred. The FCC proposed action aimed ultimately at helping citizens and constraining abusive “middle-mile” rent-seeking. Based on what the FCC learned about the “middle mile” from all the telephone companies, cable companies, and other providers in this market, the Wheeler FCC in May 2016 issued a proposed rule aimed at revamping the noncompetitive portions of the “middle-mile” marketplace.