The Federal Communications Commission exists in theory to house experts who can make informed, independent decisions on how to govern the communications industry. But that isn’t how government works in practice, as we are learning from last week’s FCC decision to impose 1934 telephone rules on the Internet.

The Journal recently reported on the extraordinary pressure the White House applied to the FCC, a supposedly independent agency, abetted by a handful of tech firms that generate increasing amounts of Internet traffic and...