The president had raised such high hopes in the tech world that some internet figures grew antsy when net neutrality failed to appear among the initial agenda items in his first term. | Getty FCC's win cements Obama's internet legacy

With a federal court upholding his administration’s sweeping net neutrality rules on Tuesday, President Barack Obama is poised to fulfill a promise he made when he first ran for the White House — to use the power of the office to keep the internet a “level playing field” for everyone.

The decision, if it holds up to an expected appeal by the telecom industry, means Obama has put his stamp on the internet in a way few political figures have. On his watch, the FCC has declared it will ensure equal footing for everyone from high-school coders to the giants of Silicon Valley. The aim: to guarantee every internet user has the chance to speak freely online and shake up the digital economy just as Netflix and Amazon once did.


The losers of the debate include internet service providers like AT&T, which have argued that the rules amount to government interference that will chill innovation on the networks they build and maintain.

While Bill Clinton presided over the internet’s evolution in the 1990s from a decades-old defense and research project into an economic engine for the country, Obama will likely be remembered for enshrining the principle that broadband networks exist to serve the greatest possible public good.



While the FCC wrote the regulations, “had President Obama not been elected or not been reelected, we almost certainly would not have net neutrality rules today," said Kevin Werbach, a former FCC official who served as a telecom adviser during Obama's transition to the White House in 2008.



"The fact that he publicly took a strong stand" in favor of treating high-speed internet as an essential part of the nation's shared infrastructure for years to come "means this will be seen, really, as part of his legacy," Werbach said.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has criticized some Obama policies as too favorable to big business, praised the court ruling preserving the FCC's rules as a boon for online freedom. “Today's decision will help ensure we don't turn over our democracy to the highest bidder,” he wrote on Twitter after Tuesday’s court ruling.

Critics of the net neutrality order, meanwhile, reacted strongly against the ruling. "The court's decision means today's dynamic, ever-changing Internet will face the strict, inflexible rules designed to regulate our grandparents' phone service," said Telecommunications Industry Association CEO Scott Belcher in a statement.

During his first presidential campaign, Obama pledged to uphold the principle of net neutrality, or the idea that broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast shouldn't be allowed to block or slow down web traffic or emails from commercial rivals that travel through their networks. That set the junior senator from Illinois apart from his opponents: His Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and eventual GOP opponent John McCain each dabbled in the issue in the Senate, but were both silent about it on the campaign trail.



"I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality," declared Obama in a 2007 campaign speech at Google's California headquarters. "The internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way."



Obama's self-branding as a digital populist enhanced his reputation among the then-powerful "netroots" contingent of online activists already drawn to him by his anti-Iraq war stance. And his ability to talk about the wonky issue in simple and clear terms helped endear him to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley, which was only then beginning to dip its toe into politics.



The president had raised such high hopes in the tech world that some internet figures grew antsy when net neutrality failed to appear among the initial agenda items in his first term.





In 2010, Google executive Vint Cerf, whose early technical work gave him the nickname "father of the Internet,” emailed then-Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin: "Has there been so much flack from the Hill that you guys feel a need to back away?"



Shot back McLaughlin: "Don't be silly. No one's backed away from anything."



Still, Obama's net neutrality vision foundered under his first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, a campaign fundraiser and Harvard Law School classmate of the president. Genachowski’s net neutrality proposal, issued after 18 months in office, suffered a double indignity: Slammed by open internet advocates as weak (one called it "an explicit stamp of approval for online discrimination"), it was later overturned by a federal appeals court for standing on shaky legal footing.



The president’s next choice to head the FCC — Tom Wheeler, a former cable lobbyist — didn’t inspire much confidence among the netroots crowd, either. In fact, when Wheeler floated a net neutrality replacement plan that contemplated pay-for-play “fast lanes” for internet content, critics flooded the agency with millions of critical comments. Activists sniped that the administration had been cowed by telecom industry threats that net neutrality would kill the investment needed to deliver Americans high-speed broadband.



Though the FCC plan was Wheeler's, Obama was "partly to blame" for the looming threat of a "second-class Internet," wrote Rashad Robinson, executive director of the progressive group ColorofChange. Tech advocate Cory Doctorow titled a post on the geek culture blog Boing Boing, "Barack Obama will take a backseat to no one when it comes to (promising) Network Neutrality."



A few months later, however, Obama burst out with a position that left no doubt where he stood — and where he wanted his FCC chairman to be. He forcefully advocated for regulating broadband service in the same way that the FCC has regulated traditional telephone utilities to ensure all web traffic is treated equally.





"I am asking the Federal Communications Commission to answer the call of almost four million public comments," said Obama in a video that went viral, "and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality." Wheeler would later propose, and the FCC would approve on partisan lines, a plan that would do just that.

Republicans accused the president of interfering in the work of what is supposed to be an independent agency. The telecom industry ramped up its arguments that the rules create over-regulation that will stifle investment in network technology — and AT&T, CenturyLink and a variety of trade groups sued to overturn the order.

To those net-neutrality activists who once faulted Obama's resolve, the move was — if long-overdue — an ultimately savvy keeping of his campaign-trail promise.

Obama clearly had sized Wheeler up more accurately than he had, Doctorow wrote in an email to POLITICO Tuesday.

"He gave cover, and a push, to his appointed chairman, and advocates who were wavering," said ColorofChange's Robinson. "The president's voice on this was a game changer. It changed the political calculus."