Meet The Two Women Who Hold The Future Of The Internet In Their Hands

Ryan Grim, Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 09/02/2014 7:31 am EDT Updated: 09/04/2014 2:59 pm EDT

WASHINGTON -- One of the most consequential decisions Washington is set to make in 2014 won't come out of the White House, Congress, or any of the nation's boardrooms, but rather from a nondescript federal building along the city's southwest waterfront. It's here, in the offices of the Federal Communications Commission, that the fate of the Internet will be decided.

The FCC is currently revising rules on "net neutrality" -- or the idea that all web traffic should be treated equally -- after a federal court in January struck down a regulation that forced Internet service providers to abide by the principle. But the court allowed the FCC to go back to the drawing board and craft new net neutrality rules under a different statute that would pass muster. In April, agency Chairman Tom Wheeler introduced a draft proposal that would still effectively end net neutrality, though he puzzlingly claimed in public that it would not.