On Monday, President Barack Obama effectively endorsed “net neutrality”—the idea that Internet providers should treat all content equally, without giving or selling preferential treatment to some. In doing so, Obama has picked a big fight with corporate lobbyists—and created a stark contrast with the Republican Party.

Net neutrality can seem like a fairly technical issue. After all, the policy fight is over exactly how the Federal Communications Commission defines Internet companies: Are they mainly in the business of transmitting content or creating it? The answer determines how much leeway corporations like Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, and AT&T—all of which have built and control the infrastructure of online communication—have to discriminate against some content providers or Internet users.

The basic principles are less complicated. As John Judis writes over at The New Republic, the basic issue at the heart of net neutrality is "whether government can force megaliths like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to act in the public interest." Doing so inevitably sets up a conflict. On one side are powerful lobbyists for those giant companies: They oppose net neutrality because they would like to charge users and limit access however they'd like. On the other side are public interest groups and their allies. They believe that the only way to keep the internet just as it is—as a competitive free market—is to regulate it, so that a handful of companies can’t control it at the expense of consumers. This is the side Obama has taken, and he captured their philosophy with his statement, "We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas."

Republicans take a different view. Congressional Republicans have almost unanimously voted to overturn net neutrality proposals and refused to support Democrats' Open Internet Preservation Act. Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz quipped that net neutrality was “Obamacare for the Internet,” while House Speaker John Boehner described Obama’s endorsement of net neutrality as “a textbook example of the kind of Washington regulations that destroy innovation and entrepreneurship." Boehner’s statements are consistent with conservative philosophy, which preaches that even well-intentioned regulations do more harm than good. What Boehner does not say is that net neutrality is also consistent with Republican Party behavior, which is frequently about pleasing corporate interests.

Of course, both parties cater to donors and lobbyists—a point that Senator Mike Lee made. “The easiest bipartisan measures to pass are almost always bills that directly benefit Big Business,” Lee wrote, “and thus appeal to the corporatist establishments of both parties. In 2015, this ‘low-hanging fruit’ we’ll hear about will be items like corporate tax reform, Obamacare’s medical device tax, patent reform, and perhaps the Keystone XL pipeline approval.”