The Bandwidth Breakup: How One Court Told the FCC to Stop Pretending 1934 Could Run the Internet

In early 2025, inside a Sixth Circuit courtroom far from the noise of Silicon Valley, a case unfolded that would quietly rewrite the rules of America’s digital future. For years, the Federal Communications Commission had tried to fit broadband internet into a regulatory category designed for rotary phones, treating it as a “telecommunications service” so it could enforce the familiar principle of net neutrality. But in Ohio Telecom Association v. FCC, the court delivered a message the agency had long feared but Congress had long avoided confronting: the Communications Act of 1934 was never built to govern the internet, and no amount of interpretive acrobatics could change that.

The ruling did not arrive with the drama that usually accompanies debates over internet freedom. There were no sweeping speeches about innovation or dystopian monopolies. Instead, the judges posed a blunt question: where, exactly, in the aging statute did the FCC find permission to regulate broadband as a common carrier? Their answer was equally blunt: nowhere. If Congress wanted broadband treated like a public utility, it needed to write a modern law, not rely on an agency to bend Depression-era text until it resembled something contemporary.

With that, the regulatory stage shifted dramatically. Net neutrality—the idea that all online content should travel at equal speed—had always depended on the FCC’s ability to classify broadband in a particular legal bucket. Once the court knocked over that bucket, the entire structure collapsed with it. Internet service providers gained new freedom to shape traffic on their networks. Consumer advocates warned of a world where deep-pocketed companies could buy faster delivery lanes while smaller voices lagged in the digital slow lane. ISPs, unsurprisingly, celebrated the decision as the end of regulatory whiplash.

Yet the real significance of the ruling extended beyond internet fast lanes. It exposed a growing tension at the heart of modern governance: the mismatch between old laws and new technologies. For nearly two decades, Congress avoided updating the nation’s communications framework, leaving the FCC to stretch antiquated authority as far as courts would tolerate. In Ohio Telecom, the courts finally stopped tolerating it. The judges weren’t rejecting regulation—they were rejecting improvisation.

What made the case remarkable was how quietly it reshaped the balance of power. With a few paragraphs of statutory interpretation, the court shifted control of the internet’s architecture away from federal regulators and toward private companies—yet it did so without modifying a single existing rule or writing a single new one. The decision didn’t change any code, but it changed what could legally be done with that code.

And so, in 2025, the future of the internet was redefined not in Washington boardrooms or tech summits but in a courtroom in Ohio, where a panel of judges concluded that the laws governing the digital world must come from Congress, not clever reinterpretations of the past. Until new laws are written, the nation’s most essential modern infrastructure will remain governed by the accident of an 80-year-old statute—and the courts that insist on reading it exactly as it was written.