With their sights firmly set on restoring the protections the Republican-controlled FCC repealed, advocates for net neutrality on Monday announced a new campaign to get senators' phones ringing off the hook with constituents demanding the lawmakers save the open internet before time runs out. "Every internet user, every startup, every small business—the internet must come together to sound the alarm and save net neutrality," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, in a statement announcing the protest.

A California bill that would impose the nation's strictest state net neutrality law is being replicated in the New York state legislature. In California, the bill was approved last month by two Senate committees despite protest from AT&T and cable lobbyists, and it needs to go through one more committee before getting a vote of the full state Senate. Today, a lawmaker in New York said he has teamed up with the California bill's author to introduce an equivalent bill in the New York legislature.

A Toronto man is elated after a deputy judge ruled that a verbal contract he made with a Bell customer service agent trumps the contract the telecom later emailed him, noting prices could increase. In a judgment issued last month in a Toronto small claims court, Deputy Judge William C. De Lucia said that Bell's attempt to impose new terms after a verbal contract guaranteeing a monthly price for 24 months had been struck was "high-handed, arbitrary and unacceptable."

In direct response to the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) December vote to repeal net neutrality protections, more than 100 mayors nationwide have now signed a pledge vowing to defend the open internet at the local level.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is allegedly delaying the repeal of net neutrality to help web providers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, Motherboard reports. The slow pace of implementing the repeal, which will allow Internet service providers to prioritize certain traffic, is in sharp contrast to the rapid speed at which Pai pushed the new rules through the FCC for approval despite a significant amount of public concern.

Big business is quietly trouncing cities in the fight over the future of the internet. The results of an obscure, bureaucratic battle inside the U.S. communications regulator could decide not only which Americans get ultra-fast internet but how much it’ll cost and even what city streetlights will look like. On Wednesday, a committee created by the Federal Communications Commission will meet to frame the future of 5G, a technology that will make downloads dramatically faster on phones and perhaps replace home broadband for some.

The Obama-era net neutrality rules, passed in 2015, are pretty much dead. As of Monday, some of the proposals regarding the Republican-led FCC's oversight of the internet, known as "Restoring Internet Freedom," will go into effect. Because this is Washington, DC, and nothing is simple, key parts of the proposal, which include the changes to net neutrality, don't go into effect until a vote by the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB wasn't available to comment on when the vote would take place. But this is just a procedural step. The net neutrality rules as we knew them will be no more.

Internet service providers celebrated four months ago when the Federal Communications Commission voted to eliminate nationwide net neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. But now Internet service providers in California are terrified that they could end up facing even stricter rules being considered by the California legislature.

The U.S. Commerce Department is blocking Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE Corp. from importing American components for seven years, accusing the company of misleading U.S. regulators after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran. Shenzhen-based ZTE agreed...

It was hard to avoid seeing the video posted last week showing local news stations reciting a "must-run" script about fake news from their parent company, Sinclair broadcasting, in eerie synchrony.

After suffering cyberharassment, one California woman has to pay to keep her stalker from contacting her. Discussing consumers' legal rights, M. O’Neal, who asked to keep her full name private for safety purposes, shared with the Northern California Record how she must pay $5 per month to block her cyberstalker, a small-business owner she met once when having a gift custom-made for her father, through her Verizon Wireless service.

A group of Senators have called on the Federal Communication Commission to reconsider its proposal to scale down a program that helps poor Americans get affordable internet. Following 68 Congress Members from the House who sent a similar plea last month, 11 minority Senators, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have co-authored a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to reconsider the move, which would strip access to the program from 70 percent of current subscribers.

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved an application by Elon Musk's SpaceX, allowing the aerospace company to provide broadband services using satellites in the U.S. and worldwide. "With this action, the Commission takes another step to increase high-speed broadband availability and competition in the United States," the FCC said in a statement.

It would be one of the largest municipal broadband networks in the world.  Now, Los Angeles is studying an aggressive plan to protect net neutrality.

ISPs continue to buy state laws preventing towns and cities from making their own, local broadband infrastructure decisions. An effort in Wyoming to pass legislation that would award state grants to help rural Wyoming communities get high-speed internet instead got hijacked by CenturyLink and Charter Spectrum lobbyists, resulting in a bill getting passed this week that simply blocked towns and cities from being able to deploy their own broadband networks.

Scared yet? Comcast’s Xfinity broadband internet access service has been found blocking a number of legitimate sites through its ‘Protected Browsing’ option. The internet is full of bad things: malware, phishing attacks, nefarious ads. And parents are loathe to let their kids surf, thanks to rampant online piracy and pornography.

Now that the House of Representatives has floated a superficial net neutrality bill, it's the Senate's turn. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy has introduced a companion version of the Open Internet Preservation Act that effectively replicates the House measure put forward by Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. As before, it supports net neutrality only on a basic level -- and there are provisions that would make it difficult to combat other abuses.

Republicans in Congress are continuing to push a net neutrality law that would preempt state net neutrality rules and let Internet service providers charge online services for prioritized access to Internet users. The Open Internet Preservation Act would prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet content but clear the way for paid prioritization or "fast lanes."

Ajit Pai’s FCC is, like the rest of the Trump Train, off to a rollicking and hypocritical start, if two big news items this week are anything to go by. On Tuesday, Pai introduced an initiative to identify areas desperately in need of broadband deployment (good!) and today, the Washington Post reports that the FCC has blocked nine companies from participating in a federal program that subsidizes broadband service for low-income households (bad!).

A pair of test satellites launched into orbit by SpaceX on Feb. 22 may herald the dawn of a truly global internet, one that makes high-speed service available not only in cities and in rural areas covered by cellphone towers but at almost any point on the planet. Dubbed Tintin A and Tintin B, the satellites are prototypes for SpaceX’s “Starlink” initiative, which aims to place thousands of satellites in low-Earth orbit to supply broadband internet to users on the ground — including people in remote areas and even aircraft in flight and ships at sea.