With Dish Network owner EchoStar selling $23 billion in valuable spectrum to AT&T, any pretense that the TV provider will become a serious wireless competitor is dead. But the project was always doomed to fail, and despite plenty of assurances by the Trump administration and other companies involved, the very obvious writing was always on the wall.

Back in 2020, the first Trump administration rubber-stamped T-Mobile’s $26 billion merger with Sprint. There were endless warnings from unions, economists, and consumer groups that the consolidation would harm US wireless competition, resulting in layoffs, worse service, and higher prices — warnings that quickly came true.

More than 9,000 T-Mobile employees lost their jobs, the wireless sector stopped seriously competing on price, and T-Mobile increasingly began to behave exactly like the competitors it once promised to disrupt.

The first Trump administration approved the deal without even reading the proposal. Trump’s “antitrust enforcer” at the Department of Justice at the time, Makan Delrahim, was criticized for using his free time and personal devices to help the companies gain approval. T-Mobile also found itself under fire for ramping up patronage of Trump hotels to try and seal the deal. (It’s the kind of pay-to-play arrangements that have become decidedly uglier during Trump’s second term.)

To downplay the harm from the T-Mobile deal, Trump officials worked with Dish and T-Mobile to construct a complicated plan they claimed would counter the harms of consolidation. Under the proposal, Dish would acquire Boost Mobile from Sprint — and valuable spectrum from T-Mobile — to cobble together a fourth wireless competitor and restore balance to the US wireless market.

The plan was destined for failure. US regulators, with a history of coddling telecoms, never really seemed capable of the kind of competent oversight required to nanny the build to fruition. The two remaining US wireless industry giants, AT&T and Verizon, were heavily incentivized to lobby the government to ensure added competition never materialized.

Dish Network also had very little experience in wireless, which became obvious when The Verge found Dish’s 5G network to be a disappointing mess with limited phone support, patchy coverage, middling connectivity speeds, and a janky website and sign up process.

As part of the deal, Dish struck an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that the new network would reach 75 percent of the country using its valuable spectrum assets. And while the company met some early deadlines, it didn’t take long for Dish to start missing debt interest payments, forcing the FCC to grant extensions to prevent the plan from becoming an embarrassment.

With growing talk of a potential bankruptcy, Dish managed to buy itself a little time by orchestrating an all-stock merger with EchoStar in 2023, a deal the companies insisted would create “a global leader in terrestrial and non-terrestrial wireless connectivity.”

But with hints that Dish’s wireless ambitions were already circling the drain, the remaining wireless giants (and Space X) began hungrily eyeing the company’s valuable spectrum assets. Last May, the FCC, led by Brendan Carr, announced it was launching an investigation into Dish and EchoStar’s compliance with FCC 5G buildout requirements.

Carr’s threats to pull EchoStar’s spectrum licenses (less than a year after the company had negotiated an extension with the previous administration) annoyed unions, consumer groups, and “free market” Conservative groups alike, albeit for different reasons.

EchoStar’s sale of $23 billion in Dish spectrum licenses to AT&T this week appears to be the direct result of direct pressure by Trump officials. The arrangement demolishes Dish’s ambition to become a fourth wireless carrier, empowers AT&T as a dominant carrier, and ends any hopes that the US can fix the competitive harm caused by the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile.

The deal is a windfall for Dish and EchoStar, which acquired the spectrum in question for $13.5 billion. EchoStar saw its stock value jump 70 percent on the news and is likely to use the proceeds to fund its low Earth orbit satellite constellation. 

Dish’s wireless ambitions may stumble forth headless for a while, but analysts indicate the company still has an estimated $30 billion in additional spectrum assets that are also likely to be steadily carved up and sold to the nation’s biggest suitors.

“More spectrum sales will surely follow, and if today’s transaction is any indication, those, too, could fetch more than we had imagined,” Moffett Nathanson analyst Craig Moffett predicted in an investor research note.

Unfortunately, the Dish gambit only really functioned as a way for Dish Network to string regulators along while its costly spectrum assets appreciated, while also providing industry-friendly regulators a convoluted and costly distraction from the harms caused by their rubber-stamping of further harmful telecom consolidation. 

One 2024 study by telecom analysis firm Rewheel found that the T-Mobile and Sprint merger effectively put an end to wireless price competition in the United States.

“Five years on, the Sprint T-Mobile 4-to-3 mobile merger made the U.S. one of the most expensive mobile markets in the world,” the Finland-based research firm stated. “While monthly prices were falling and continue to fall across mobile markets…after the merger prices in the U.S. either stopped falling altogether or fell at a much slower rate.”

Meanwhile, T-Mobile, which once heralded as a pro-consumer disruptor in US wireless, increasingly looks exactly like Verizon and AT&T – two companies that former trash-talking CEO John Legere used to mercilessly ridicule. Promises by T-Mobile that the Sprint merger would be a huge job creator instead resulted in more than 9,000 layoffs.

This was all repeatedly predicted by economists, analysts, and consumer groups. Those warnings were ignored, repeatedly, by government officials across multiple administrations. The end result is a costly, embarrassing, completely avoidable mess.

The Trump administration’s second term has already featured no limit of additional telecom merger approvals, which will likely result in mass layoffs and worse, less affordable service. Combined with the administration’s relentless quest to defang federal corporate oversight and consumer protection, consumers are likely to be paying the price for decades to come. 

For the better part of a generation, low-income and minority US communities have struggled to gain access to affordable broadband. It’s not an accident: numerous studies indicate that major internet service providers, or ISPs — despite billions in taxpayer subsidies — have consistently avoided low-income, minority, and tribal neighborhoods when it comes to affordable fiber upgrades. 

It’s something federal policymakers historically haven’t done much about — until now. The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside $42.5 billion for broadband. It also tasked the FCC with crafting new rules taking aim at “digital discrimination.” On November 15th, the agency obliged, passing rules banning ISPs from broadband discrimination based on income, race, and religion.

“These rules are strong,” FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “I am grateful to so many in the civil rights community who have helped us give it meaning and the companies that worked with us to improve our process.”

But while activists are thrilled the government has formally acknowledged decades of inequity, they say the FCC went out of its way to avoid criticizing ISPs that have historically discriminated. They also worry that, at an agency with a shaky track record on consumer protection, the rules may not be consistently enforced.

A problem generations in the making

US broadband has long suffered from a lack of regional competition. Most Americans live under either an internet monopoly or a duopoly, resulting in patchy coverage, slow speeds, terrible customer service, and some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world. 

The problem is particularly pronounced in low-income, minority, tribal, and other marginalized communities that have long been victims of redlining, or institutionalized discrimination in everything from home loan approval to the delivery of next-generation infrastructure. 

In 2017, minority residents of Cleveland and Detroit filed formal complaints with the FCC, noting they were consistently paying AT&T premium prices for sluggish DSL, while neighbors in more affluent, less diverse communities received faster, cheaper service. The petitioners’ broadband was so slow, it hampered the ability of their children to access online homework.  

“Redlining, in any form, is often framed as ‘disinvestment in communities of color,’” Paul Goodman, a lawyer at the Center for Accessible Technology, told The Verge. “That’s only half the picture. Redlining is an investment transfer — money that should go to communities of color and low-income communities is instead redirected to wealthier, whiter communities.”

The lack of affordable internet access severs these communities from modern healthcare, education, and employment opportunities. The problem was highlighted during peak covid-19 lockdowns, when low-income families resorted to huddling in the dirt outside fast food restaurants just to attend online class.

“The digital divide is in many ways a side effect of redlining and the ‘urban renewal’ projects of the 1970s, because broadband has been deployed where good infrastructure exists, and for decades infrastructure investments were determined by racist government policy,” Adria Tinnin, director of race equity policy at The Utility Reform Network, told The Verge. “In other words, it’s not that an ISP has an explicitly racist policy, it’s that they are building on top of infrastructure that was determined by racism, thereby reproducing the negative effects.”

Discrimination has long been present in the construction of US highways and the delivery of reliable and affordable electricity. The deployment of next-generation fiber often runs parallel with both, shaped by decisions made decades or generations earlier.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has been tracking the problem for years. The organization closely studied broadband deployment gaps in Cleveland and Detroit and found large local ISPs consistently refused to upgrade broadband networks in minority neighborhoods or areas where poverty rates exceed 35 percent.

ISPs like AT&T have repeatedly denied they ever engaged in any form of digital discrimination. In 2021, the company claimed, without evidence, that the NDIA’s findings were based on “antiquated, inaccurate and cherry-picked data.” 

While it’s no surprise that publicly traded telecoms are often fixated on ensuring an adequate return on their investment, these companies have been given untold billions in regulatory favors, subsidies, and tax breaks in exchange for the promise of even broadband deployment. While ISPs may deny that they engage in digital discrimination, the data keeps getting clearer. 

Last year, The Markup studied 800,000 broadband promotions across 38 cities and found that big ISPs not only refuse to upgrade poor and minority neighborhoods but they also charge these customers more money for slower speeds than those in more affluent and less diverse areas. In many locations, the broadband coverage gaps line up perfectly with historic redlining data.

Fixing the problem has proven to be a complicated mess, in part because the government has historically failed to accurately map affordable broadband availability, rein in sector consolidation, or share broadband pricing data. Big ISPs have long fought against improved broadband mapping or public price comparisons for fear it would highlight market failure.

The telecom industry has already threatened to sue the FCC over the new rules and is particularly incensed at the government’s plan to tackle discriminatory broadband pricing. Industry-allied GOP senators wrote the FCC to complain the rules would harm “the practical business choices and profit-related decisions that sustain a vibrant and dynamic free enterprise system.”

But real-world data indicates that US broadband is far from a vibrant and competitive free market. In reality, it’s a collection of powerful regional monopolies and duopolies that often lobby the government into apathy as they charge captive subscribers a premium for patchy, expensive internet access. It’s a problem that’s always worse for marginalized Americans. 

A very promising start, but activists say it’s not enough

Simply creating a framework that tethers historical discrimination to modern broadband redlining is a huge step forward, opening the door to meaningful action down the road, said Shayna Englin, director for the LA-based Digital Equity Initiative.

“It could be a lot stronger in a myriad of ways,” Englin said. “But I will say, we are absolutely celebrating where it landed on the definition of discrimination and access. That makes a world of difference and opens up at least, as far as we see, new avenues that are actionable.” 

NDIA executive director Angela Siefer shared those sentiments in comments to The Verge, noting that the FCC’s decision to craft rules that cover both “disparate treatment” (inequity caused by active, provable discrimination) and “disparate impact” (inequity in deployment, regardless of intent) will be historically useful moving forward. 

Short of executives putting discriminatory intent in an email to staff, intentional discrimination in broadband deployment can be difficult to prove. Including guidelines that cover disparate impact will be helpful to police systemic discrimination, regardless of conscious intent, activists say. 

“The Digital Discrimination draft rules are not all we wanted but we got the most important — the definition of digital discrimination includes disparate impact,” Siefer said. “This was not easy. NDIA spent a ridiculous amount of time on this because it is so important. And we got it. This is a huge win.”

At the same time, many digital equity activists contacted by The Verge expressed concern that the order doesn’t go far enough to penalize existing bad actors and may not be consistently enforced by an agency with a rocky history of standing up to politically powerful telecom giants closely tethered to US domestic surveillance and first-responder systems.

Consumers will soon have a new system to file discrimination complaints with the FCC, which will be forwarded on to the ISP. If the ISP doesn’t address the concerns, the agency says its enforcement bureau will step in to take action and will conduct “self-initiated Commission investigations” when warranted by available data. Past discrimination will see no penalties. And the process will largely rely on these complaints rather than proactive FCC investigations, although the FCC says it will take action if consistent patterns reveal themselves.

“Nothing in these rules would address historical, existing and the ongoing redlining and discrimination against BIPOC and low income communities by large corporate ISPs,” Brandon Forester, a media and telecom reform activist at MediaJustice, told The Verge. “The FCC expressly declined to look at or eliminate existing discrimination.”

Forester noted that the FCC complaint process is cumbersome and not publicly transparent, and consumers stuck on slow, expensive broadband may not even understand they’re being discriminated against. Given the FCC voting majority shifts with the winds of each presidential election, future, consistent action on complaints is also far from certain. 

“Even if a complaint rises to the level of the FCC intervening, we still have a secret process that isn’t public, won’t remediate the discrimination, and at best the FCC may quietly fine the ISP,” Forester said. “So there’s very little disincentive for ISPs who are discriminating to change their behavior. Secret fines and settlements, without any real remediation for the discriminatory behavior, simply becomes a cost of business calculation.”

Tackling monopoly power head-on

Activists say that to truly address discrimination in broadband deployment, federal regulators have to more seriously tackle market failure and monopoly power. These entrenched monopolies work tirelessly to undermine competitive alternatives while lobbying the federal government to ensure regulatory oversight is as feckless as possible.

“We have to acknowledge that we have widespread market failure in the market for residential telecommunications, and that market failure has been driven by incumbent providers, who have not only failed to deliver on promises to close the digital divide, but have actively thwarted any federal policy that would help new entrants gain a foothold,” Goodman said. 

Goodman noted that the government has a long history of throwing billions of dollars at regional monopolies in exchange for networks that routinely wind up only partially deployed, whether in rural Mississippi, the hills of West Virginia, or the streets of New York City.

“We have to stop giving broadband subsidies to ISPs that have built their profitability off of digital discrimination,” Goodman said. “Those providers have repeatedly made decisions that resulted in disparate access to broadband, and now they are demanding taxpayer funds to solve a problem which ISPs themselves have created.”

Activists say there’s a path forward. Federal support of open-access fiber networks and community-owned broadband (including by cooperatives and city-owned utilities) can challenge monopoly power, boost competition, and lower the cost of market entry. The end result: faster, cheaper, and more equitable broadband access inherently less prone to discrimination. 

But it’s hard to fix a problem you can’t or won’t measure. While there has been progress since Congress passed a 2020 law demanding the FCC do a better job on broadband mapping, both consumer groups and state leaders say it remains very much an active problem. And the agency still refuses to collect and publicly share essential broadband pricing data.

Some of the FCC’s inaction can be blamed on an industry-backed blockade of popular FCC nominees like Gigi Sohn, leaving it without a voting majority for much of President Joe Biden’s first term. But even with the recent confirmation of Anna Gomez, activists remain skeptical that the agency has the political backbone to consistently stand up to industry giants when it truly matters. 

Neglected neighborhoods aren’t waiting for the FCC to get its act together. Hundreds of US communities have been building community-owned and -operated broadband networks in a quest for better, faster, and cheaper internet access. That includes Cleveland, which recently launched a plan to deploy citywide fiber and wireless broadband for as little as $18 a month.

Whether the FCC’s digital discrimination protections can begin to truly repair generations of injustice remains unclear. Industry lawsuits could derail rule implementation until long after infrastructure bill subsidies begin to flow, complicated by looming, industry-backed Supreme Court rulings aimed at undermining the independent authority of US regulators.

The next presidential election will matter as well; while the creation of digital discrimination rules was a congressional mandate, Republican FCC leadership — which historically has sided with the telecom industry on most issues of substance — could simply choose not to enforce them.

Still, the federal government’s belated formal acknowledgment of systemic discrimination remains monumental and historic all the same, providing a much stronger foundation for those on the front lines of the fight for equitable and affordable access. 

Joshua Edmonds, CEO of equity activism nonprofit DigitalC, is working closely with Cleveland city officials to help build its new network. He told The Verge he was cautiously optimistic about the FCC’s rules and was quick to acknowledge the historic precedent.

“It’s one thing for an activist group to say that, or even a local equity champion, but for the FCC to acknowledge that digital discrimination has persisted, that’s moving in the right direction,” he said, adding that he has been impressed by the agency’s community outreach sessions in cities like Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Topeka.

“But what does it mean to be penalized?” he asked. “Is it a public facing walk of shame? What actually is it? I think this FCC has big ambitions, and I laud them. I think the question that I have is: with big ambitions, do you guys have teeth? And I don’t know if they do or not.”

To sell regulators on their $26 billion mega merger, T-Mobile and Sprint executives told anyone who’d listen that the deal would provide near-miraculous benefits. But economists warned that US telecom merger promises are historically meaningless, and the reduction in overall competitors would — sooner or later — result in higher prices and job cuts. 

Instead of heeding their warnings and blocking the deal, US antitrust enforcers concocted an elaborate workaround: they would erect Dish Network as the nation’s new fourth major wireless carrier. Under the plan Dish received some T-Mobile spectrum, the Boost Mobile prepaid brand, and the assurance that T-Mobile would help Dish run a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) while it got its own nationwide network up and running.

But squabbling between the companies culminated this week in Dish announcing it would be replacing T-Mobile with AT&T as its primary partner, indicating that T-Mobile and Dish were simply incapable of getting along, and the government was never that interested in forcing them.

“If T-Mobile is able to shirk this regulatory obligation with impunity, what’s to prevent future consent orders from being ignored?” Hal Singer, an economist who testified against the merger approval tells The Verge.

Earlier this year, Dish called T-Mobile a “grinch” for shutting down its CDMA network earlier than Dish had expected. In complaints to state and federal regulators, Dish accused T-Mobile of reneging on its merger promises, and claimed the shutdown risked leaving many of Boost’s 9 million wireless customers without service in 2022. T-Mobile has denied fault and effectively accused Dish of not understanding its own agreement.

So far the Biden administration, focused largely on Big Tech policy conversations, hasn’t taken much action in the telecom space. The administration has yet to fully staff the FCC, and only just appointed a DOJ antitrust enforcer this week. Dish’s deployment goals are far off, and any meaningful government action, if it comes at all, likely remains years away. 

The deal gives Dish until 2025 to deploy its wireless network to 70 percent of the population. Given that 70 percent of the US lives on roughly 3 percent of the country’s landmass, that shouldn’t have been a particular challenge. (Dish hasn’t given any public indication that it’s nearing that goal yet.) But it’s getting to 95 percent coverage where Dish needs help, given that the remaining chunk lives on ten times the land mass as the initial 70 percent.

That’s where Dish’s $5 billion deal with AT&T comes in. Under the proposal, AT&T will grant Dish MVNO customers access to AT&T’s 4G and 5G networks in rural and harder to reach markets, as Dish focuses on building out its own 5G network in major cities. Dish will still have access to T-Mobile’s network until 2027, but AT&T will now be Dish’s primary partner.

In a research note to investors, Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett argues that while Dish’s relationship with T-Mobile may have soured, the deal with AT&T likely increased Dish’s chance of survival as a wireless operator — for the time being.

“Under the T-Mobile agreement, Dish had until 2025 to satisfy the FCC, but only two more years afterwards to satisfy the much more exacting demands of customers,” Moffett says. “That was always the real challenge.”

Given that AT&T has never offered CDMA access, the arrangement won’t solve Dish’s complaints about T-Mobile’s decision to shutter its CDMA network, potentially harming Boost Mobile subscribers. AT&T, meanwhile, nabs significant wholesale revenue with the dangerous bet that Dish will never become successful enough to erode AT&T market share. 

But with Dish bleeding wireless and TV subscribers at an alarming rate, the clock is ticking on Dish’s overall survivability. In the next six years, Dish has to remain financially viable, build out a massive and popular next-generation wireless network, keep state and federal regulators happy, and somehow steal meaningful market share from a US telecom sector historically averse to being meaningfully disrupted by competition.

It’s a big ask for a company long criticized — including by T-Mobile in 2018 — for gobbling up troves of valuable spectrum, then not delivering on its promises to put that spectrum to use. While the government deal bars Dish from selling its spectrum for six years, analysts have long pondered if Dish will just string regulators along, sell its spectrum, then use the immense profits to laugh off any remaining regulatory, legal, and contractual obligations. 

Moffett tells The Verge that Dish has already spent upward of $10 billion in long-term cellular tower leases, and risks losing its spectrum in addition to financial penalties for missing deployment goals. Singer, however, remains unimpressed by the integrity of the merger arrangement with the government and still thinks an early Dish exit remains possible.

“The decree always gave Dish an easy out,” Singer says. “The real target of the regulation was T-Mobile. And now T-Mobile is getting to slither out.”

The saga could also end with AT&T buying Dish Network, AT&T nabbing Dish’s vast spectrum holdings, the US wireless industry consolidating even further, and everybody involved pretending none of this ever happened.

Meanwhile, other merger promises remain unfulfilled. T-Mobile’s promise that the deal would create new jobs — still viewable over at the company’s website — wound up not being worth much. Despite claiming the deal would be “jobs positive from day one and every day thereafter,” the company has eliminated 5,000 positions so far, much as critics like Singer predicted. 

Historically, antitrust enforcers are supposed to look at the available evidence of a proposed union and act accordingly. In the case of Sprint and T-Mobile, the Trump FCC approved the deal before even seeing impact analysis, and the Trump DOJ’s top antitrust enforcer Makan Delrahim personally worked with all three companies to ensure deal approval.

Instead of simply blocking the merger and finding a way to prop up Sprint, the resulting solution always required a great deal of optimism in both the integrity of corporate merger promises and the competency of US regulators. Now consumers are left waiting for a network that may never arrive, based on relationships that were sour from the start.

“Just as Delrahim scripted it,” Singer jokes.

In a statement on Monday, the White House promised to veto the Save the Internet Act — a bill designed to restore net neutrality protections and undo the FCC’s extremely unpopular 2017 decision to repeal them. To justify the veto, the statement painted a picture of surging broadband investment and robust new networks, free to flourish now that Title II was out of the way.

“Since the new rule was adopted in 2018, consumers have benefited from a greater than 35 percent increase in average, fixed broadband download speeds, and the United States rose to sixth, from thirteenth, in the world for those speeds,” the White House said. “In 2018, fiber was also made available to more new homes than in any previous year, and capital investment by the Nation’s top six Internet service providers increased by $2.3 billion.”

Unfortunately for the White House, there’s no evidence to suggest any of those improvements had anything to do with killing net neutrality. Some of the data points aren’t accurate, and others are the result of policies from past administrations.

The first portion of the government’s data comes courtesy of an Ookla broadband speed report from last December, which found that average fixed broadband speeds increased by 35.8 percent in 2018. However, the speed tests at the heart of the report were conducted by Ookla users between Q2 and Q3 of last year. Net neutrality wasn’t formally repealed until June 11th of 2018 — or about halfway through the measurement period in question. There’s no evidence to suggest the net neutrality repeal impacted these numbers one way or the other, and past analysis has shown recent broadband growth to be well in line with past years.

The claim about record deployment of fiber (a favorite of Pai’s FCC) also has less to do with deregulation than the White House would have you believe. At least half of 2018’s 5.6 million new fiber-connected homes are included as a condition of AT&T’s merger with Time Warner, negotiated by the previous FCC. As part of that agreement, AT&T agreed to deploy fiber to an additional 3 million homes every year; a far cry from the “light-touch regulatory scheme” the government claims was responsible for the growth.

There’s a litany of other reasons why 2018 broadband speed improvements likely had nothing to do with net neutrality. Cable operators spent much of 2018 finishing up relatively inexpensive DOCSIS 3.1 cable upgrades, which began before Trump was elected. Other improvements were courtesy of community broadband efforts the Trump FCC has actively opposed.

One of the other figures is pulled directly from a telecom lobbying group’s press release. The White House boasted that telecoms had invested $2.3 billion in better networks over the course of 2018 — but the figure seems to have come from a press release sent out by USTelecom, a major broadband lobbying group, which attributed the rise to the FCC’s new hands-off approach. But not everyone agrees: consumer groups say the connection isn’t supported by hard data — and industry CEOs have even disputed that the Title II was stifling investment.

“Whether we look at inflation-adjusted figures or nominal values, these companies did not invest $2.3 billion more in 2018 than they did in 2017,” Free Press general counsel Matt Wood told The Verge. “In fact, four of those six companies saw investment declines in 2018, and the total decline for all of them put together was more than $1.5 billion” said Wood, who pointed to his group’s own analysis of the data.

Wood said there are lots of reasons why industry investment ebbs and flows, including the level of competition ISPs face in their home territories. Few, if any, of those reasons have anything to do with the Pai FCC’s decision to repeal net neutrality.

“To claim that large ISPs increased their spending when they did just the opposite—whatever the natural cause for such decreases—is a fraud designed to deter Members of Congress from voting for rules that their constituents need and demand by 4 to 1 margins,” Wood said.

Regardless, the Save the Internet Act still faces long odds as it winds its way through the legislative process. While it may survive a vote today in the House, it faces a tougher uphill battle in passing the Senate and avoiding a Trump veto. Should it fail, the rules could still be restored by an ongoing lawsuit filed by 23 state attorneys general.

“It’s obviously a long shot,” Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer told The Verge. “But so was stopping SOPA,” they said, referring to a hugely controversial copyright law only thwarted due to immense internet backlash.

“Either way, we’re getting more and more members of Congress on the record in support of real net neutrality protections,” Greer said. “That’s the key for restoring net neutrality in the long term, and the Save the Internet Act gives us a powerful path to push our way toward that goal.”