Yesterday’s open meeting on net neutrality in Washington, D.C., was in every way a public spectacle. Outside of the offices of the Federal Communications Commission, protesters—some of who had been camping out for days—beat drums, waved signs, and chanted slogans. The press corps was in full attendance, bringing a mess of tripods and telescopic lenses. At the hearing itself, F.C.C. commissioner Mignon Clyburn told a story about her mother, while chairman Tom Wheeler, his jaw firm, drew lines in the sand. “I will not allow the asset of the open Internet to be compromised,” he said emphatically. His proposal to consider* a rule passed on a 3-2 vote and was immediately criticized by all sides. Net neutrality has undoubtedly captured national attention.

You’d be excused for wondering what all the fuss is about. Most people have a rough sense that net neutrality is about the rules for Internet traffic; but the precise debates about regulatory authority and the rules themselves are abstruse. Net neutrality has seized the moment because it is standing in for a national conversation about deeper values.

It is, among other things, a debate about opportunity—or more precisely, the Internet as another name for it. The Web’s famous openness to anyone with vision, persistence, and minimal cash recalls the geographic frontiers of earlier America and the technological frontiers of the twentieth century, as in industries like radio and early computing. As such, the mythology of the Internet is not dissimilar to that of America, or any open country—as a place where anyone with passion or foolish optimism might speak his or her piece or open a business and see what happens. No success is guaranteed, but anyone gets to take a shot. That’s what free speech and a free market look like in practice rather than in theory.

In “The Frontier in American History,” the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that it was frontiers that created the essential aspects of American democracy. Life on the frontier, he wrote, was what developed “the courageous determination to break new paths” and “indifference to the dogma that because an institution or a condition exists, it must remain.” The debate over net neutrality, by this reckoning, is a classic debate over the closing of a frontier. The fear is that industrial consolidation, as it has before, will diminish opportunities for the new, idealistic, and optimistic, leaving behind the established, tested, and cynical. It would be the lapse into plutocracy that Turner and others feared.

The ideal of equality in the public sphere is another underlying theme in the current debate. While there’s always been some inequality, it is especially acute today. That fact becomes most disturbing when it reaches beyond private realms. It may be one thing for the rich to drive better cars; it would be another to divide public roads between rich and poor, ostensibly to avoid “congestion.” The prospect that the F.C.C. might allow a “fast lane” for some traffic, leaving everyone else in a slower lane, has ignited the argument that private inequality must have its limits, and that some public spaces must remain open to all.

Some in the net-neutrality debate argue that the Internet should be understood as a “public utility,” which has restarted another old debate. Calling something a public good or utility is to declare that there are some services that are not mere luxuries, but essentials—goods that might be said to form part of the country itself and which shape what it offers its citizens. It would be a strange, poorer vision of a nation, for example, if the fire department didn’t bother with less affluent neighborhoods, or if electricity were available to some but not all. The Internet isn’t as essential as electricity, but it has become almost as necessary to contemporary life.

Apart from these abstract ideas, net neutrality is also standing in for a debate regarding the future of television, which is the most popular medium of our time. The clash between Comcast and Netflix over allegations of false congestion and the payment of extra fees is woven into the larger discussion. Comcast, of course, mainly represents what television is now, while Netflix represents what it is becoming.

There are plenty of other questions, as well. One is whether the government, which created the Internet in the first place, is bound to stay away from it. Policy wonks can puzzle over the distortions caused by “termination monopolies.” The bottom line is this: the debate over net neutrality is only nominally about packets and bits, and more accurately about what kind of country we want to live in.

* An earlier version of this post said that a rule had passed.

Photograph: American Stock/Getty.