On Tuesday, a federal appeals court upheld the government’s repeal of net neutrality rules. The court affirmed the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to classify internet service providers such as Comcast and AT&T as “information services,” as opposed to “telecommunications services.” That definition allows them to avoid the responsibility of providing open and nondiscriminatory access to their networks. In the terms of this debate, it allows the companies to prioritize “fast lanes and slow lanes.”

But the ruling did keep net neutrality alive — by overruling the agency’s claim that it could pre-empt state governments from setting out their own net neutrality requirements. The decision opens the doors for states to fill the regulatory void. Internet service providers should be quaking in their boots: As of today, they run the serious risk that they’ll have to follow a patchwork of different state requirements. The companies may not have liked the previous administration’s decision to classify them as common carriers, but that at least provided them with a uniform national policy. That is now gone.

At present, 34 states (and the District of Columbia) have introduced some kind of open internet legislation. The leading net neutrality law was passed in the nation’s most populous state, California, and follows the rules that the F.C.C. overturned. California agreed to hold off on enforcing their new net neutrality law until the pre-emption question was answered by the court. That hold is now off: If you live in California, you will have an open internet. It remains to be seen whether California’s law becomes the de facto open internet law across the nation or whether it becomes one of many different net neutrality laws.

The very same issue has animated the debate over federal privacy legislation. Because of a privacy law (also passed in California) and the actions of other states, network companies (along with others such as Google and Facebook) have been forced to ask Congress for a national privacy law to clear up potential interstate discrepancies. Interestingly, the lack of a uniform privacy policy began early in the Trump administration when the Republican-controlled Congress repealed another Obama-era rule that limited the networks’ access to the personal information of their subscribers. Into that void stepped, once again, California.