President Barack Obama sided with open-Internet activists on Monday, urging the Federal Communications Commission to draft new rules that would reclassify the broadband net to regulate it more like a public utility.

The end result would tie the hands of Internet service providers that want to cut special deals with services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon to push their streaming content along a 'fast lane' that ordinary Americans can't access.

The FCC has been working on the new rule for seven months, and has received nearly 4 million comments from the public.

Its first attempt at a 'net neutrality' rule met with the judicial axe in January with a federal court sided with Verizon and ruled that the government agency lacks the legal authority to control how Internet companies set their prices.

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President Barack Obama announced a full-court press Monday on 'net neutrality,' a policy that would prohibit Internet service providers from playing favorites as they allocate resources online

REBRANDING: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is already framing Net Neutrality in a way that connects it to the president's increasingly unpopular medical insurance overhaul

Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed a framework this year that prohibited Internet service providers like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable from blocking any content, but allowed deals where content providers would pay ISPs to ensure smooth delivery of traffic.

Wheeler said in April that his FCC would propose that 'broadband providers would be required to offer a baseline level of service to their subscribers, along with the ability to enter into individual negotiations with content providers.'

'In all instances, broadband providers would need to act in a commercially reasonable manner subject to review on a case-by-case basis.'

Obama campaigned on the issue of net neutrality. He said in a statement Monday that the FCC's new rules should explicitly ban any paid prioritization deals.

'Simply put: No service should be stuck in a 'slow lane' because it does not pay a fee,' Obama said. 'That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet's growth.'

'I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online.'

He also said the FCC should apply its new rules equally to mobile and wired ISPs.

Two GOP senators pushed back – hard.

Net neutrality 'puts the government in charge of determining Internet pricing, terms of service, and what types of products and services can be delivered, leading to fewer choices, fewer opportunities, and higher prices for consumers,' Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote on Facebook.

'"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government,' he added on Twitter.

South Dakota GOP Sen. John Thune said Obama's vision relied on 'rules written nearly 80 years ago for plain old telephone service.'

'The president’s stale thinking would invite legal and marketplace uncertainty and perpetuate what has needlessly become a politically corrosive policy debate.'

The move Obama seeks would rely on Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, a law that never contemplated life in the Internet age.

MEANWHILE, 13 TIME ZONES AWAY: Obama avoided questions about his Net Neutrality position by having the White House release a statement while he was in China

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group that represents broadband providers, said it was 'stunned the president would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the Internet and calling for extreme Title II regulation.'

In taking a position in favor of net neutrality, Obama is siding with liberal activist groups that want the FCC to put ISPs in a new category so that they can be regulated more like public utilities.

One such group, CREDO, is a self-described 'progressive mobile phone provider' that operates more like a nonprofit than an ISP.

'This is huge,' CREDO political director Becky Bond said Monday in a statement.

'President Obama just proved whose side he is on – that of the American people and an open and equal Internet.'

'Obama’s statement is simply a cynical political ploy, a way of playing to activists on the radical Left who have built mailing lists and a political movement on the most absolutist conception of net neutrality,' the libertarian think tank TechFreedom said in a statement.

'There is no dispute about the propriety of transparency rules and bans on discrimination and blocking. But this tectonic shift in national policy, should it be adopted, would create devastating results.'

Obama waited to announce his position until after the midterm election. The White House emailed the news to reporters while the president was in China for a Trans-Pacific Partnership meeting.