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Tony, you're on your report on tech policy for the Washington Post over the weekend California went and passed the strongest net neutrality law the countries ever seen and then the department of justice immediately turned around and sued them.

Yeah, we're going back to court once again to talk about the future of the internet and all of this has to do with net neutrality.

Why do we care about net neutrality because this is a decision that is going to affect websites that we all have access to and it is also going to be affecting how quickly we can access many of those websites.

Now we should define what that is right for the folks at home sure for the folks at home and neutrality is the idea that an internet service provider like AT&T and Comcast and Verizon must treat all web traffic equally.

So they can't slow down your internet connection in an arbitrary way they can block you from viewing the websites you want to view and they can't charge companies for faster delivery of their music, their movies and their other content which are known as online fast lines.

The idea was that a company could say like AT&T you know what I've got to deal with Netflix so you know what I'm going to slow down Hulu.

What are like the standing rules here on net neutrality? What's still on the books?

Nothing really is on the books. Essentially what the Trump administration had done is removed most of the Obama administration's rules.

The FCC voted along party lines three to two to repeal what's known by the God awful name as net neutrality.

And under Obama you couldn't block or slow down access to websites as we said you couldn't create online fast lanes.

You had to tell consumers what your network management principles were and the government could come after you and punish you if you broke any of those rules.

Yeah. Under the Trump administration basically it's all about transparency. If you're an AT&T or a Verizon you got to tell users what you're doing with your network and if you break your promise or you act in an anti competitive way it's another agency that doesn't even normally touch telecom that's the sole regulator there and they're pretty limited in what they can do.

And that's the Federal Trade Commission. That's the FTC.

And it's a very different approach from Obama. It's not as heavy handed in the eyes of telecom companies but it's not aggressive enough. It's not good enough in the eyes of net neutrality advocates.

As one of the dissenting FCC commissioners put it today. What saddens me the most today is that the agency that is supposed to protect you is actually abandoning you.

How did the states respond when the Trump administration and the FCC made this change?

The states were pretty angry and about 22 US states sued the Federal Communications Commission after it voted to reverse net neutrality.

There's now this brewing litigation around whether the Trump administration had the authority to repeal the rules in the first place.

And that lawsuit has the support of major tech companies and consumer advocates and will play out in the court system over the next few months.

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