In the halcyon 1950s, Hutzler’s department store employed 1,500 sales, office, and Colonial tea room dining staff. “Probably 2,000 during the holidays,” says Michael Lisicky, author of Hutzler’s: Where Baltimore Shops. “You went downtown to shop, lunch, see a show, go back, and shop again,” he says. “Lexington and Howard was the busiest intersection in the state.”

In a twist of fate hardly fathomable when the 140-year-old family business shuttered in 1989, that corner, specifically the former luncheonette basement of the old Hutzler Brothers Palace, is now home to one of the busiest “intersections” in the world. An estimated 25 percent of global internet traffic—including half of the emails, Amazon orders, Netflix streams, and iPhone downloads in the U.S.—pass through the stacks of underground AiNET servers there.

Many Baltimoreans know the backstory: In 1858, 23-year-old Abram Hutzler convinced his father, Moses, a German-Jewish peddler, to sign for credit so he could open a dry-goods store, which eventually set a record among American department stores for tenure at its original location.

Fewer know the current story: Deepak Jain, son of Indian immigrant parents, launched AiNET—originally a web-hosting company whose revenues now surpass $100 million—in his parents’ basement while attending Glenelg High School. (When he was a restless 6-year-old in a rural community without a lot of children nearby to play with, his parents had gotten him a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer to keep him occupied.) By 1994, while in theory a sophomore Johns Hopkins University pre-med student, Jain’s business was growing fast enough that he could pay his own tuition.

Since then, AiNET, which employs two dozen workers on site, has expanded into a data center, cloud storage, IT services, and cyber-security business. Clients include federal contractors Jain can’t mention, as well as tenants at his telecom hotel such as Comcast and Verizon. In 2014, Jain bought the five-story Hutzler Brothers Palace on Howard and the adjoining seven-story building on Lexington known as One Market Center—where the Hutzlers tried and failed to reinvent themselves in 1985.

One of Jain’s related missions is Future Cities, an effort to bridge Baltimore’s digital divide by building a free Wi-Fi network across the city. Meanwhile, change has been percolating on the outskirts of the long desolate block. The Everyman and Hippodrome theaters and Bromo Arts District have sparked activity. Historic Lexington Market is also due for a $30-million-plus redesign.

For his part, Lisicky would like to see more AiNET initiatives similar to its collaboration with The Contemporary art museum in 2017, which opened the Hutzler Brothers Palace’s renown Art Deco doorways to the public for the first time in nearly three decades. The irony that what was once such a social hub now channels our digital communication—even a local text or email sent via the internet inevitably bounces through AiNET servers—isn’t lost on Lisicky. “There’s still a heartbeat in that building. It’s just digital and buried.”

As far back as 1941, Albert Hutzler, then company president, saw the handwriting on the wall. Long before his beloved department store came to its end, he had alerted a city planning conference at Hopkins that urban blight, unchecked, would lead to falling downtown real-estate values and transform Baltimore into a “ring city” with a shrinking core surrounded by thriving suburbs.

He added that such flight is not so much a problem for a merchant. “They go to the outlying communities and go on to build there,” said Hutzler, who would build stores in Towson, Catonsville, Dundalk, Glen Burnie, Woodlawn, Bel Air, and White Marsh. “It is the city itself that goes to pieces.”

Long gone are the days of dial-up Internet and AOL messenger where internet speeds were universally slow for everyone. Now, we all get impatient if our Instagram feed doesn’t refresh in milliseconds or our videos on YouTube start to buffer. This is all made possible by something called net neutrality—open and fair Internet service.

In 2015, regulations were placed so that internet service providers (ISP) treated all online content the same—not showing favoritism to certain websites or penalizing others with slower speeds based on your ISP. Today, the FCC—headed by Trump-appointed chairman Ajit Pai—voted to repeal these rules, changing the way we use the Internet moving forward. Maryland is one of 18 states in a multi-state lawsuit challenging the net neutrality repeal. 

Deb Tillett, executive director of Emerging Technologies Center (ETC), an incubator for tech startups in Highlandtown, explained how the repeal of these regulations will drastically affect the small businesses and innovation in the city.

In layman’s terms, can you explain what net neutrality means?
It means that the internet should be an open marketplace, available to anyone, at any time, with total equality, regardless of who they are, without disclosing why they’re using it. So in the same way that you would use your telephone line and nobody stops you from making any calls that you care to, whether it’s offensive to anyone or not, you can pick up your phone and dial. The internet itself should be considered a basic utility, and it’s the foundation and fundamental nature of everything that we do. By doing away with net neutrality, you essentially put a gatekeeper in place.

Without net neutrality, I wouldn’t be able to sound as smart as I do about the topic because the articles I’ve read wouldn’t be openly available to me. [Laughs]

That’s a great point. Why do you think the net neutrality rules were established in the first place?
As we got more sophisticated and realized we could do more things with the internet, it became necessary to keep it the neutral, open marketplace that it had become. Monopolistic service providers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are literally in charge of content. So the FCC put these rules in place—they had been trying to do it for years, but it wasn’t until 2015 that they were actually able to get the laws passed.

Why do you think that the FCC wants to repeal the rules now?
I think it’s greed. They would essentially be back in control, so if they had a preferred provider of content, they would favor that. Again, I think it goes back to bottom lines, that the three monopolistic service providers would have more ways to create more income.

What would that mean for small business and startups in Baltimore?
It’s extremely critical in a city like Baltimore, where the small businesses and innovation spaces are the foundation of our economy. This has the greatest impact on small businesses and startups because, if you have an idea for an app or you want to put up a website, you can’t afford to pay what a larger, fiercer competitor pays and it ultimately puts you out of business.

It’s stomping on the little guy because big guys can afford to pay more for content, pay more for faster speeds, pay more—you hear what I’m saying? It’s all about pay. Small businesses rely on the internet for their websites to attract customers. Using web advertising to push people into a store. The ability to block speech and prevent any kind of free speech is really disturbing to me.

Wow. What about regular consumers and local nonprofits?
It’s an absolute blow to minorities and underserved communities. People who have used this open internet to organize to get the word out about oppressions for them—to find like-minded people to come together and make a stand. Providers could potentially sensor that content if they don’t like what you’re saying.

It has the direst of consequences. The internet’s openness is what fosters job creation, competition among small businesses, and clearly innovation. 

Do you think that there’s anything that the Baltimore tech industry can do about the net neutrality rules being repealed?
The only possible solution is that we band together and do the best we can to have it overturned. We would have to—it would put tons of people out of business. It’s so crazy. I can see it being a real detriment to any kind of startup. Some of my mature companies can probably find a way, but some of the folks just starting out and developing apps and want to get the apps out there, absolutely, positively depend on this open marketplace.