The National Journal's Ron Fournier argues that the loss of net neutrality could be the spark that ignites a populist tech revolt:
Where is the outrage? I asked that question of a half-dozen technology experts, including Obama administration veterans who witnessed the derailment of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a 2012 copyright protection bill that technology activists feared would undermine internet access an innovation. Two years after an online insurgency overwhelmed the gilded institutions of Washington, the grassroots are relatively quiet.

"The internet providers lost the battle and won the war," said a former Obama administration official who refused to be identified while criticizing the administration. "They've got their hooks into most members of Congress and both major parties." Said another: "Godspeed to the American consumer. We could be screwed and not know until it's too late."

If net neutrality dies and the internet "rails" suddenly become more expensive and less reliable via monopolies, the protests will be loud. Cheap, easy access to information, entertainment and e-commerce are as engrained in modern American life as the telegraph and trains had become in early 20th century. Take that away, and the elites will pay.

That brings me back to the Gilded Age, when innovative entrepreneurs morphed into monopolists who corrupted Washington and exploited workers. They were corralled by the era's "new media," so-called muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell. It was Tarbell who wrote a series of magazine articles on Rockefeller and Standard Oil that put an ugly human face on the trusts, galvanizing the nation behind Roosevelt's fledgling populism.