California often marches to the beat of its own drum when it comes to national issues still being debated in the public forum and it often wields the power of influence on important issues. One of the issues that state regulators will be focusing on tomorrow is net neutrality, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The critics of Worcester, Massachusetts give ISP Comcast two thumbs way, way down; the city council in Worcester, MA does not want Comcast coming anywhere near its residents and is being very vocal about it. The town is currently serviced by Time Warner Cable, but if the proposed merger between the two ISPs gets approval from the Justice Department and the FCC, it could end up taking over that cable system.

The city of Worcester is not interested in that happening.

According to a blurb in Politico's Morning Tech, cable operator Comcast has filed a response to dozens of pages of detailed questions the FCC asked it back in August related to its merger with Time Warner Cable.

A filing by Comcast SVP Kathryn Zachem attempts to answer some of those burning questions which includes information on its subscriber base and regional sports networks it owns.

An earlier response sent in by the company was deemed "insufficient" by the FCC.

Netflix has released its Speed Index for September, showing that a paid prioritization deal with Verizon is finally paying off for customers. In September, Verizon FiOS topped all other major ISPs in Netflix performance with an average stream rate of 3.17Mbps. In August, Netflix streamed at an average of 2.41Mbps on Verizon FiOS;in July it was at 1.61Mbps; and in June, 1.58Mbps.

Netflix performance on Verizon DSL has improved slightly, hitting an average speed of 1.68Mbps in September.

President Barack Obama said yesterday that he is still “unequivocally committed to net neutrality” and said that he would like the Federal Communications Commission to ban paid Internet fast lanes. The President made his comments about net neutrality yesterday in response to a question at an event hosted by Cross Campus in Santa Monica, CA.

Incumbent Republican Rep. Marcia Blackburn (pictured, left) has represented Tennessee's District 7 in the House for seven years, and she hopes to make the eighth time the charm. First she has to get by Democratic challenger Dan Cramer, a 26-year U.S. Army veteran who believes that the current Congress is unproductive and obstructive mess.

Redbox Instant will be shutting down tomorrow, according to an announcement by Redbox. Verizon's attempt to compete against Netflix and to supplement Redbox's brisk kiosk-based movie and video game rental service with an online streaming component, is being closed after two-years in existence.

"Redbox Instant by Verizon... will be shut down on Tuesday, October 7, 2014, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time," customers were told in a notice on the service's website.

While they won't say it publicly, broadband and mobile service providers are kind of ticked off with Verizon for suing the FCC in federal court and winning earlier this year. Sure, Verizon got a lot of the Open Internet Order invalidated, but the Federal court actually gave the FCC guidance it needed to move forward: reclassify broadband (and maybe even mobile) as "common carriers" like the telephone under Title II of the Telecommunications Act and get the legal authority they need to enforce the rules.

Verizon Wireless was set to start throttling LTE users on Oct. 1 as part of what it called an expanded "network optimization" program, but the company decided not to after the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler started questioning the validity of the practice.

In an interview with CSPAN, Maureen Ohlhausen, a Republican commissioner with the Federal Trade Commission says that the FCC's plans to reclassify broadband as a "common carrier" under Title II of the Telecommunications Act (as part of a tweak to make net neutrality rules enforceable) would strip the agency of its ability to enforce consumer protection rules.

While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has put forth some interesting changes that he'd like to see rolled into the Open Internet Order of 2010, fellow Democratic commissioners are publicly calling for even stricter regulations on broadband and mobile providers.

Comcast has a popular argument it likes to use when discussing the proposed merger between it and Time Warner Cable with the FCC: since it doesn't compete against TWC in any city or town in the United States, there's no harm in approving the deal.

Comcast, in its ongoing quest to merge with Time Warner Cable, is trying to convince the FCC that becoming one with one of its rivals won't take away any competition from the market because there's still plenty of other competition out there. Comcast submitted the response to the FCC on September 11, but it wasn’t made public until recently by the FCC due to technical problems with the agency's web site.

Verizon has long opposed net neutrality rules and was one of very few companies to sue the FCC in Federal court. Ultimately it prevailed, with the D.C. District court ruling that the FCC did not have the authority to enforce them because broadband and wireless service providers were not classified as common carriers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. It has also spent - according to San Francisco-based data firm Quid - $100 million to lobby Congress on net neutrality since 2009.

Republican advocacy group American Commitment announced that it has gathered 772,000 American signatures on a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to avoid "regulating the Internet" ala net neutrality.

Today is the day that Fight for the Future's "Internet Slowdown" initiative to protest the FCC's proposed changes to the Open Internet Order (also known as net neutrality) goes into full effect.

It looks like the paid peering agreements video streaming service Netflix signed with AT&T and Verizon earlier this year are finally paying off. According to Netflix's Monthly Speed Index for August, the average Netflix stream on Verizon FiOS was 2.41Mbps during the month, up dramatically from 1.61Mbps in July. AT&T's U-verse service offered average Netflix performance of 2.61Mbps in August, up from 1.44Mbps in July.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler (PDF) Monday calling for a ban on "fast lanes" and urging the commission to regulate broadband companies like traditional phone companies (categorize them as "common carriers" under Title II of the Telecommunications Act).

In case you missed it, video streaming service Netflix will be taking part in Fight for the Future's "Internet Slowdown" initiative to protest the FCC's proposed changes to the Open Internet Order (also known as net neutrality).

On September 10 rights group Fight for the Future and several prominent technology companies will show the Internet what it might be like if the FCC makes the changes it wants to make to net neutrality.

Earlier this year FCC chairman Tom Wheeler proposed changes to the Open Internet Order (also known as net neutrality) that would make it okay for service providers to charge content providers for faster and better access to their customers. This change, commonly referred to as "fast lanes," has been largely rejected by consumers and embraced by some service providers.

Net Neutrality gets some much needed love in the September 2014 issue of Game Informer. Game Informer is the number one gaming magazine in the United States, so it's good to see it taking a closer look at how fast lanes, data caps, and general discrimination of traffic by ISPs can affect everyday consumers.

According to this U.S. News report, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is seriously considering reclassifying broadband internet services in the United States as common carriers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House technology subcommittee, is asking Reddit to "rebrand" net neutrality. The contest, found here, seeks to repackage and rename the concept of equal treatment for online content and to "bring some clarity to an otherwise muddy legal debate before the FCC finalizes its proposed open Internet rules."

Time Warner Cable is the latest internet service provider to get a fee from streaming video service Netflix, according to GIGA OM. Time Warner Cable has officially signed a paid peering agreement with Netflix, giving it direct access to the ISP's customers.

Comcast and Time Warner Cable have pulled $132,000 in donations from an event honoring a current FCC commissioner, according to Ars Technica. Earlier this week the news that the donation was being given to the dinner honoring FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn set off a firestorm of accusations that the companies who would like to become one giant ISP were trying to buy Clyburn's vote on the proposed merger.

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is urging the FCC to host a series of planned hearings on "net neutrality" rules outside of Washington.

The FCC is seeking further input on several changes to net neutrality including allowing ISPs to charge content providers for faster access to customers (commonly referred to as "fast lanes"). During its public comment period for these changes, more than 1 million comments were submitted, with the majority of them opposing the changes.

TechCrunch reports that the Federal Communications Commission will host four Open Internet Round Tables related to net neutrality in Sept. and Oct. The four roundtables will be broken up into six sessions:

-September 16 (morning): Policy Approaches to Ensure an Open Internet

-September 16 (afternoon): Mobile Broadband and the Open Internet

-September 19 (morning): Effective Enforcement of Open Internet Requirements

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler downplayed differences between President Obama and the FCC's stances on net neutrality. President Barack Obama said last week that he does not support allowing service providers to charge content providers for faster access to customers.

President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that he does not support the FCC proposal for fast lanes - allowing service providers to charge content providers for faster access to customers. The last time the President spoke about net neutrality directly was in 2008 during the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney.

President Obama said that making the Internet more accessible to some at the expense of others was against his administration's policy on net neutrality rules:

In a status update on Facebook, Netflix CEO Red Hastings said that Netflix now generates more revenue than premium pay channel Home Box Office (HBO). Reed said in his post that the company managed to pull in $1.146 billion compared to HBO's $1.141 billion.