Barack Obama delivered on his promise to make a stand for a free and open internet: by declaring his support for network neutrality this week, he has finally put the weight of his administration behind a position he had originally – and strongly – campaigned for. Now, after six years of posturing, will he get something done?

Network neutrality is a regulatory commitment to preserving the architectural principles upon which the internet was founded, guaranteeing that no content or application could be discriminated against by a network owner. It was guaranteed because the technology of the internet didn’t have the capacity to do anything else – the ability to discriminate was not in its code.

But over the last decade, technologists have developed new code that makes it increasingly simple for network owners to pick and choose the content and applications they want to favor, or to block or slow the content and applications they oppose. And armed with these new anti-neutrality tools, it could be Comcast or AT&T that decides what the future of the internet will be, not the innovators and users who have built it so far. Without the rules of network neutrality, they would use the power their own code provides, as any corporation would, to maximize their profits, regardless of the effect on internet innovation.

The puzzle in the president’s move, however, has little to do with the substance. Network neutrality is the right policy. It cuts across the left and right among internet activists. But does the president’s willingness to take up this issue now signal a newly liberated, post-political Obama? Or is this the beginning of a fight for executive authority against a clunky and captured “independent” agency – the Federal Communications Commission?

The president preempted his hand-picked chairman of the FCC by announcing his own strong policy position before the FCC made a final determination about network neutrality, and after FCC chair Tom Wheeler had hinted that he and his fellow regulators intended to enact a very different policy. By acting first, Obama is pushing Wheeler to either conform to the president’s view, or to stand strong against the man who appointed him.

If Wheeler gets in line, then we’ll just have one more example of the success of the small politics of Washington in a time of stalemate: the full force of the White House succeeds in persuading an independent commissioner to do as the president wills.

But if Wheeler refuses, then it might be a chance for the executive to exercise a kind of presidential authority that only constitutionalists on the furthest of the far right believe the president has. Believers in a strong unitary executive branch think the president has the power to remove even independent commissioners – at least when they act in a way that is fundamentally contrary to the will of the executive (and, in this case, contrary to the submitted comments of nearly 4m Americans). Dismissing Tom Wheeler would give the president and the supreme court a chance to revisit a question first raised against President Franklin Roosevelt, and decided against him – only this time, the president’s strongest ally on the court would be none other than Justice Antonin Scalia.

But if this move isn’t meant to set up one kind of executive-power showdown or another, and if it instead signals the beginning of a post-political Obama, then that is good news indeed. There was no political return – in the world of money-driven electoral politics – for taking on the network companies before last week’s midterms elections. Cable companies and cellphone networks are very eager to avoid exactly the kind of regulations which network neutrality would impose. Had Obama signaled his strong support for that regulation in advance of the election, no doubt many more millions of dollars would have entered the race to support opponents of the president’s agenda.

Barack Obama now has zero political constraints: he doesn’t have to stand for reelection, his party has not treated him well, and he’s free – in his last two years – to act in a way that defines the legacy of his administration, even if he cannot control the policies that Congress will enact. The man who was delivered to the presidency by the power of a free and open internet, grassroots donations-style, rightly should defend that very platform against imminent threats.

Let’s hope this is just the first in a series of initiatives Obama will launch in 2015 and 2016 that he should have taken up six years ago. Here’s another: Obama was the first president since Richard Nixon elected without public funding for his campaign. When he turned down public funding, he promised to propose a new presidential public funding system. He should make good on that promise too.

And if he does, why stop there? If the last six years have taught us anything, it is how little even a great president can do when faced with a Gulliver Congress strapped by the Lilliputian ties of special interest money. Let these last two years of his administration be a firm and full commitment to rallying America to what the vast majority of Americans already believe: that we must find an end to the system of corruption that lets nothing in Washington work. Not just to save the internet, but also to make it possible for this Congress to address every other important issue that this nation faces.