Did ISPs bring the FCC's net neutrality action upon themselves?

In the wake of the FCC's net neutrality vote on Thursday, cable and telecommunications companies are characterizing the new set of regulations as something akin to a government sledgehammer.

They are chafing under a future of greater oversight over how they deliver Internet traffic to the consumer -- in other words, there's now a big check on who controls the pipes.

The FCC probably would not have even gotten to the point where they reclassified the Internet like a utility had Verizon not challenged a previous set of net neutrality rules, adopted in 2010, that had a lighter regulatory touch.

Those rules were imposed without Title II reclassification and, unlike the new regulations, exempted wireless providers from some of the more stringent provisions.

Back then, most ISPs said that they weren't crazy about the rules, but they could still live with them. Not Verizon. It challenged net neutrality and won, as the D.C. Circuit said that the FCC imposed them without establishing the proper regulatory authority.

In the immediate aftermath of the court's decision in January 2014, there was plenty of commentary that net neutrality was dead.

In April, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler proposed an approach that would have stopped short of reclassification. Yet his idea drew immediate criticism as being too weak and triggered a backlash that generated online protest campaigns, pickets outside the FCC offices and even, at one point, demonstrators who blocked the driveway of his home.

Through the summer the FCC was flooded with more than 4 million comments -- a massive outpouring that drew comparisons to the protest that helped sideline major antipiracy legislation, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, in 2012.

The turning point, however, was in November, when President Obama threw his support behind reclassification.

So how did ISPs find themselves on the losing end of one of the FCC's most momentous policy debates?

After all, even congressional Republicans who once questioned the need for any net neutrality rules at all last month proposed legislation that would ban blocking, throttling and paid prioritization. The legislation also would apply to wired and wireless services, although Democrats have balked that it also limits what the FCC can do when technology changes in the future.

Net neutrality advocates had the advantage of framing the debate first, and having as their foe cable and telecom companies, which aren't exactly the most beloved of American companies.

It also helped that Netflix threw its weight behind the FCC's action, setting itself up as a chief foe to major ISPs and giving some urgency to the issue by claiming that it was pretty much forced into paying Comcast (CEO Brian Roberts pictured at right) and Verizon new sums to deliver their video traffic.

While ISPs argued that Netflix was skewing the issue, who is a consumer more likely to trust? Cable and telecom companies offering Internet service are in the unpopular position of also being bill collectors, to whom many consumers write three-figure checks each month. And those prices keep rising.

The situation would probably be a lot different if the FCC was about to extend its oversight over Internet companies, the Twitters and Facebooks and the Googles of the world, rather than companies that own the pipes.

Now the debate over net neutrality is likely to move to the courts and to Congress, where Republicans are investigating how it all came to this. There is likely to be an even louder chorus of voices that this is an unprecedented government power grab.

There's already been plenty of hyperbolic rhetoric that it's big government that is taking control of the Internet. But in this latest chapter of this long slog toward open Internet protections, net neutrality advocates were quicker to define the real threat as Internet service with no control at all.