Not sure why people are downvoting this but Title II goes back to the Communications Act of 1934 [1] [2] [3].
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.
Sorry; I (and presumably your original comment) meant the designation of Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II. This designation was applied in 2015.
ISPs were Title II until 2005 when Michael Powell, the Republican FCC chairman who was appointed by George Bush, reclassified the ISPs as Title 1 as part of the Republican plan to spur internet growth in the US via deregulation. (What we now call) Net neutrality violations followed soon after, but weren't widely reported until 2007 at which point people belatedly realized that Comcast had been violating net neutrality since 2005.
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.
