• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 1, 2015

Four years ago, Silicon Valley successfully rallied opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act -- bipartisan proposals that would have enabled entertainment companies to easily obtain court orders banning search engines from returning links to sites connected to piracy.

Warning that the laws could effectively hamper legitimate speech, a broad array of companies tech including Google, Reddit and Wikipedia urged their users to petition against the proposed measures. The initiative worked: Faced with a grassroots protest, lawmakers shelved the bills.

At the time, Internet service providers were bound by net neutrality rules that prohibited them from blocking or degrading content. Those rules were later vacated, prompting the FCC to pass new broadband regulations this year.

If the current rules are also vacated, protests similar to the ones against SOPA might never get off the ground. That's according to Fordham law professor and former candidate for New York governor Zephyr Teachout, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the net neutrality regulations.

"Because some ISPs (such as Comcast) had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for these bills, they might have a strong incentive to block or throttle anti-SOPA/PIPA voices that could threaten their investment," she argues.

She points out that Alamo broadband, which is asking the court to vacate the rules, is already asking for the right to censor material. The company argues in its court papers that the rules infringe broadband providers' free speech rights, because they "compel providers to carry all speech, including political speech with which providers disagree."

Teachout warns that accepting this argument could result in consumers losing the ability to speak freely online.

"If Net Neutrality rules are overturned on First Amendment grounds, we would expect ISPs to gradually shape the viewpoints that are favored online," she argues. "ISPs might, for instance, provide faster service to particular political viewpoints that align with their own, or where a politically-oriented, well-funded group or media organization paid them to do so."