After Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s account, conservative interest in mandating online platform neutrality spiked. Meanwhile, progressives alarmed by the Capitol riot called for reviving the Fairness Doctrine to combat the misinformation circulating about the election. The national mood has never been more favorable for some kind of government regulation of the internet. The Fairness Doctrine hasn’t been active policy at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) since the 1980s, so public knowledge of the doctrine is hazy at best. But the more you learn about the actual history of the Fairness Doctrine and its antecedents, the clearer it becomes that applying similar regulations to the internet would be a mistake.