On Saturday, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers released a statement on the strike of 45,000 Verizon workers in the Northeast: Members of CWA and IBEW at Verizon Communications will return to work on Tuesday, Aug. 23, at which time the contract will be back in force for an [...]

We haven’t had a really large labor strike in a while, so this action from Verizon repair technicians, FiOS installers and call center workers is unusual. Verizon is really trying to eliminate many of the gains made by the Communication Workers union over the years, so the striking workers have little recourse but to strike. [...]

The White House has issued a veto threat for any bill that seeks to overturn the net neutrality policy put in place by the FCC last year. This week, House Republicans will offer a “resolution of disapproval” to take down the FCC action. This kind of resolution only requires a simple majority vote in either [...]

You can say that the entire goal of Julius Genachowski’s pretend plan for net neutrality was to devise something that the telecoms could live with, while allowing him to make a defense that the Obama Administration fulfilled its campaign promise of Internet freedom. If they didn’t care about being taken to court over their plans, [...]

Henry Waxman has been trying to enshrine the terrible compromise promulgated by Google and Verizon into law, by pushing a truly terrible bill on broadband that strips the FCC of rulemaking and classification ability, and gives wireless Internet providers carte blanche to discriminate in favor of their products. The FCC will not have rulemaking authority [...]

Two FCC Commissioners and one US Senator slammed the Google-Verizon joint policy agreement and strongly endorsed the principle of net neutrality last night at a hearing before hundreds of citizens in Minneapolis, giving the Chairman of the federal agency Julius Genachowski all of the support he would need to regulate broadband Internet, if he so [...]

In addition to the flash mobs at Target, another rally took place in front of a corporate bad actor last week. A couple busloads of activists descended on Google headquarters and protested their new net neutrality policy, which would allow for discrimination on wireless Internet and also special “managed services” from telecom carriers. They delivered [...]

Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg, the CEOs of Google and Verizon, have an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that basically recapitulates their joint policy agreement on the open Internet. It doesn’t really cover any new ground, highlighting their support for network neutrality on the “public Internet,” while asserting a distinction between that and wireless networks: [...]

Google and Verizon have announced their joint policy agreement on the Internet and broadband, seeking a continuation of the free and open policies around the public Internet while allowing for additional services outside of that network without a commitment to net neutrality and only a commitment to transparency. On a conference call, CEOs Eric Schmidt [...]

While Alan Grayson hides behind a belief that statutory law governing net neutrality would be safer from rollback than a change in classification at the FCC, John Kerry takes the realistic view: A congressional stalemate has made passage of a net-neutrality bill unlikely for the time being, according to a statement from Sen. John Kerry [...]

The FCC had been meeting with lobbyists for the telecoms, broadcasters and Internet giants like Google for the past week, trying to accommodate them in selling out the Internet. This only worked in getting net neutrality activists to recognize what a disaster was looming in just a few short weeks. Free Press and others engaged [...]