The internet is woven into the fabric of how businesses run and how we live our lives. And as this technology has grown, so have the complications with how we build, manage, and regulate it. This should sound familiar to those with an ear for history of infrastructure. Every new and big infrastructure – for example, rail lines, telephone lines, electricity lines, or airports – costs a great deal to build and operate. Somebody had to pay for it and manage the infrastructure. Soon after, rules emerge for sharing its use.

Today’s internet is infrastructure. And the rules that govern it are as difficult as any that have been written to date. In a recent research paper we sought to explore the tradeoffs at play in an important part of this modern debate that often tops the headlines: net neutrality.

Let’s start with a proper definition. The term “network neutrality” was introduced in a widely cited law article by Tim Wu. He proposed that an internet service provider should be required to treat all data from all content providers in the same way, much as other communications carriers cannot offer one deal to a potential customer without offering it to all. More concretely, a net neutrality requirement forbids the selective “throttling” of certain types of content, which mean slowing down delivery of that content—or even blocking it. Such practices have to be within normal practices of “reasonable network management.”

Net neutrality also touches on the investment priorities for today’s internet. At the birth of the commercial internet in the 1990s the dominant activities were static web browsing and email. Today, the picture couldn’t be more different. We stream movies, go shopping, and convene on social platforms. In turn, large internet service providers (ISPs) claim that the growing amount of data transferred by content providers to end users had congested and strained their networks, causing service disruptions.

ISPs attempted to collect fees from large content providers, arguing that such fees would allow them to upgrade their hardware to accommodate the growing demand and better serve the end user. Some ISPs proposed another way to raise revenue, charging content providers for a “fast lane” that would give priority to their content and ensure faster delivery to the end user. Critics claimed that ISPs already generated healthy profits and could afford upgrades without charging content providers.

Where does the debate stand today? Last week, the appeals court of the District of Columbia declared the internet could be treated like a public utility, which gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the legal authority to enforce net neutrality requirements. The ruling also allows the FCC to bring wireline and wireless under the same regulatory umbrella, permitting the FCC to coordinate regulatory actions between the two modes of delivery.

This new court action doesn’t mean much for users and investors in the short run. This legal debate has been going on for more than five years, and over that time large ISPs have been reluctant to enact strategies that could be fat targets for these rules. During the debate the FCC repeatedly declared its intent to ‘forebear’ from using its authority to directly regulate pricing, as found in other communications networks.

All this matters to managers and investors since net neutrality rules could have significant consequences on the business models of ISPs, content providers, and other firms that depend on the transfer of data across the Internet. Managers and investors need to know about the open questions, and potential for change.

In our research, we stress several open questions:

What type of firm benefits from net neutrality rules? Major internet companies such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google, smaller companies, start-ups, and public interest groups largely supported the net neutrality rules. Suppliers of data-intensive services worried that ISPs would target rules and requirements at their services with the intent to extract fees and revenues from them. For the near term the probability of such action has become quite low. With the court ruling the pendulum of concern has moved to another question: when do these rules become too burdensome for carriers, reducing investment in infrastructure, which hurts everyone?

When an ISP increases fees on content providers for faster delivery, do user prices go down, and if so, how much? Some believe that ISPs’ pricing contains a “waterbed effect”—that is, increases in fees to content firms lead to decreases in prices to users. But this sort of relationship is not guaranteed. It is possible retail prices could rise at the same time as prices to content providers. The truth is for now we just don’t know which it is.

Does the imposition of net neutrality alter the choice over revenue models? Entrepreneurial content providers should pay attention to the effects of rules on advertising and subscription models for generating revenue. If the cost for delivery of data is borne by content providers, then businesses considering the bundling of content and advertising may be less likely to use such a model and rather opt for a subscription-based model. For now the default for most businesses is advertising, and, again, we just do not know what would happen with different regime.

Who will pay for compression and storage? While everyone wants the infrastructure to improve no one really wants to pay for it. Under net neutrality, an ISP cannot guarantee quality of service, and therefore a large content provider interested in high quality will either have to invest itself just outside the ISP’s network (e.g., content delivery networks) or recur to leased lines and business data services. In the long run, how will these costs be distributed? For now both parties pay for something to improve quality, and, again, it is unclear how this will evolve as the internet evolves.

What type of action from an ISP would motivate a regulator to end its forbearance? ISPs cannot play favorites among content providers, and offer some deals to one firm without offering it to another. Some industry experts worry that without proper net neutrality safeguards in place, an ISP offering a priority lane and a non-priority lane could benefit by degrading the quality of its non-priority slow lane in order to drive more traffic to a paid-for-priority lane. While easy to say in broad strokes that the FCC forbids contracting for a fastlane, in practice many little actions can alter the speed of data. As technology evolves the boundary between acceptable action and not may shift, and to prevent rules from becoming obsolete the rules need occasional updating and tweaks. How will that work? Again, we do not yet know.

In our view, business owners and potential entrepreneurs should hesitate to take extremist positions on net neutrality regulation. We all need a well-functioning internet ecosystem. All participants have good reason to watch the debate and to express their needs regarding the price-quality trade-off since, in the end, you get what you pay for.