In 2009, President Obama nominated Julius Genachowski, a trusted friend who had acted as candidate Obama’s technology adviser, to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. They both firmly believed in the importance of “net neutrality,” in which Internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, would not be able to give one website an advantage over another, or allow companies to pay to get into a “fast lane” ahead of competitors. That was the surest way to allow innovation to flourish, they believed.

To Genachowski and his staff, creating net-neutrality protections meant reclassifying components of broadband Internet service from lightly regulated “information services” to more highly regulated “telecommunications services.” This would subject I.S.P.s like Comcast and Verizon to certain “common carrier” regulations under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. But, according to The Wall Street Journal, Larry Summers, who was then Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, blocked this effort, fearful of “overly heavy-handed approaches to net neutrality” that could be detrimental to the economy.

So instead, in December 2010, the F.C.C. unveiled net-neutrality protections even while retaining the old “information services” classification. Many F.C.C. staff members knew this was a riskier approach; after all, an earlier attempt by the agency to censure Comcast for violating net-neutrality principles had been vacated by the courts — on the grounds that the F.C.C. lacked the proper authority. Sure enough, in January 2014, the court ruled that while the F.C.C. had general authority to regulate Internet traffic, it couldn’t impose tougher common-carrier regulation without labeling the service providers common carriers.

Is it any wonder that Tom Wheeler, who succeeded Genachowski as chairman of the F.C.C., announced this week that he was proposing to reclassify broadband Internet services as telecommunications services? What choice did Wheeler have? “Title II is just a tool to get enforceable rules to protect end users,” said Michael Beckerman, the president of the Internet Association, a trade group consisting of big Internet companies. Given the prior court decisions, that is really the only tool the government had left.