And before that no ISP would even consider tiered pricing because there were no services worth tiering. Alexadra Petri has a really good analogy over at the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/12/14/n...
>>It may not be technically illegal to bring a bear into a maternity ward, but we have, I think, started to live our lives with the expectation that nobody will do this. So if we put forth a rule saying, just so we’re clear, No Bears in the Maternity Ward, I would not expect anyone to complain that this was stifling innovation. In fact, if someone said “Hey, let’s get rid of that rule about not bringing bears into hospitals so we can restore the wonderful, competitive environment we had before,” I would wonder, “What exactly are you PLANNING that you need us to get rid of this relatively basic protection?”
The rule about No Bears in the Maternity Ward only came to be after a number of cases where someone had brought a bear into a maternity ward, following a long history of bear-free maternity wards, in which time the rule had not yet been needed.
Honestly asking, my memory of new events from that era is somewhat hazy.
What resulted were a bunch of efforts to let ISPs remain Title I but still allow the FCC to enforce net neutrality on them. They failed because the ISPs would sue the FCC over each successive plan/rules.
The last case was Verizon vs the FCC and in that case the judge said the FCC could enforce net neutrality if and only if it classified the ISPs as Title II instead of as Title I.
The FCC then took a couple years trying to find a way around this, but ultimately decided in 2015 to jsut reclassify the ISPs as Title II, because they couldn't find any other way to enforce net neutrality while keeping the ISPs classified as Title I.
PS:
>>>> VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.
This may have been revised extensively in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 [4] and with subsequent policy changes around treatment of "telecommunications services", "information services" and "common carriers" but the point remains: Title II has a long history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934#Str...
[3] https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf, pp35-136
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996...