Inside Obamas Net Neutrality Power Play
President Barack Obama's decision to call for the strictest regulation of consumer broadband Internet is the result of months of internal White House debate over how to push the Federal Communications Commission to propose stronger Open Internet rules, government and industry insiders familiar with the process tell TIME. The Monday announcement comes days before an FCC deadline on the issue. Obama's surprise statement reverberated across the worlds of policy, business and technology, and appeared to shift the momentum in the long-running war over the future of the Internet. It drew a defensive response from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, drove down cable stocks, and juiced the debate between Open Internet advocates and the nation's biggest cable and phone companies, like Comcast, Verizon and ATT. The question now is whether it will be enough to shift Wheeler and the FCC off their current, more cable-friendly path ahead of a deadline next week for the commission to publish revised rules for consumer broadband Internet. The revised rules would need to be published by Nov. 19 in order for the FCC to vote on them at an upcoming December meeting. Obama's statement is a shot across the bow for Wheeler, a former telecom lobbyist and one of the president's top fundraisers in 2008 and 2012. For the last year, Wheeler has resisted proposing Open Internet rules that would prevent broadband service providers from collecting fees from content companies in exchange for special access to Internet usersan arrangement formally known as "paid prioritization," but often dismissed pejoratively as "Internet fast lanes.", The FCC's latest rules, proposed in April, were widely panned by Open Internet advocates, including powerful Internet companies, like Google, Amazon, and eBay, for allowing for such paid prioritization agreements. Over the last six months, Obama has increasingly distanced himself from Wheeler and the FCC's proposed rules. In May, the White House said only that it would "carefully review the FCC's proposalin hopes that the final rule stays true to the spirit of net neutrality." But by October, Obama's rhetoric was almost impatient. "My appointee, Tom Wheeler, knows my position," he said during a speech in California on Oct. 10. "I can'tnow that he's there, I can't just call him up and tell him exactly what to do. But what I've been clear about, what the White House has been clear about is, is that we expect whatever final rules to emerge to make sure that we're not creating two or three or four tiers of Internet. That ends up being a big priority of mine.", Two weeks after Obama's October speech, Wheeler floated another idea for regulating consumer broadband a "hybrid approach" that would be slightly stricter on broadband service providers but still allow for paid prioritization agreements. The proposal was again panned by Open Internet advocates for allowing Internet fast lanes while calling them something else. Frustration with Wheeler's apparent unwillingness to ban paid prioritization altogether spurred some White House aides to encourage the president to take a more active role in the debate, sources who have been involved with the process tell TIME. For the last several months, Obama and his staff have been studying all of the options available to the FCC to protect an open Internet, according to a White House official. Tim Karr, who works with Free Press, an Open Internet advocacy organization, said that Obama's choice to make such a bold proclamation nowjust a week after the mid-term elections put Democrats on the defensiveis a powerful signal that his administration will be "willing to take bold executive actions even in a lame duck role."