Free Republic

Republicans in the U.S. Congress are demanding to know how much the White House influenced the Federal Communications Commission while the agency crafted net neutrality rules. The FCC has until Monday afternoon to produce unredacted email messages, focused on net neutrality rules, between FCC staff and officials with President Barack Obama’s administration, Representative Jason Chaffetz said in a letter to the FCC Friday. The Utah Republican is chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Committee. Chaffetz’s committee is “investigating the potential involvement of the White House” in the creation of proposed net neutrality rules that the FCC is...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission plans to vote on new net neutrality rules during its February meeting. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will bring a proposal to a vote during the commission’s Feb. 26 meeting, FCC spokeswoman Kim Hart said Friday, following a report in the Washington Post. It’s unclear, however, what form those rules will take. Hart declined to comment further on the net neutrality order Wheeler plans to circulate in February. Many telecom policy experts had expected the FCC to take action on net neutrality early this year after a year-long fight over the issue. Nearly a year ago,...

Consider that activists promoting this rule had previously targeted neither AT&T nor Verizon with their first net-neutrality complaint but MetroPCS — an upstart competitor with a single-digit market share and not an ounce of market power. Its crime? Unlimited YouTube. MetroPCS offered a $40-per-month plan with unlimited talk, text, Web browsing and YouTube streaming. The company's strategy was to entice customers to switch from the four national carriers or to upgrade to its newly built 4G Long Term Evolution network. Or take T-Mobile's Music Freedom program, which the Internet conduct rule puts on the chopping block. The "Un-carrier" allows consumers...

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is out with a new message to fight net neutrality: “If you like your wireless plan, you should be able to keep it.” Borrowing the phrase from President Obama, the Republican commissioner penned an op-ed with Federal Trade Commissioner (FTC) Joshua Wright, raising concerns with Obama’s 332-page plan to regulate the Internet. While the president insists his plan is for a “free and open Internet,” Pai and Wright said net neutrality is anything but. “If you like your wireless plan, you should be able to keep it. But new federal regulations may take away your freedom...