The best remaining chance for restoring net neutrality has a key day in court Friday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is scheduled to hear oral arguments in a lawsuit to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 repeal of the open-internet rules. As of right now, there’s nothing stopping internet service providers, like Comcast and Verizon, from slowing down access to blocking certain websites, or charging websites to reach users at faster speeds, as long as the companies say that they reserve the right to do so in their terms of service.

The Obama-era net neutrality protections were barely two years old when Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai began taking a “weed whacker” to the rules. The agency’s repeal officially went into effect last June, and two months later, Verizon was caught throttling the internet service of the Santa Clara Fire Department while it was responding to a massive wildfire in Northern California, forcing the emergency responders to pay twice as much to lift their data restrictions. (Verizon claims that it was a customer service error.)

Now, a large coalition of consumer advocates, 22 state attorneys general, and technology companies have lodged challenges to the FCC’s repeal, all of which have been consolidated into a single case with hundreds of pages of legal briefs for the judges and their clerks to read. The FCC and internet providers contend that the repeal was legally sound and good for consumers, and a panel of three judges will hear about 75 minutes of arguments from each side about whether the gutting of the net neutrality order was done to the letter of the law.

More at Slate.