President Obama had a clear message for the FCC this morning: The future of the internet shouldn't be bought.

In an open letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and the agency's four commissioners, President Obama urged the commission to reject a proposed "fast lane" for the Internet that had been lobbied for by cable companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable. That "fast lane" would artificially slow traffic to smaller or competing websites, which would allow ISPs to create an extrajudicial toll to have equal speech on the web.

"Simply put," he wrote. "No service should be stuck in a 'slow lane' because it does not pay a fee."

With the release of the statement, the President is telling corporations and cable-industry lobbyists that deep pockets shouldn't matter, putting him in direct opposition to some of the biggest donors and supporters of his presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. According to some estimates, FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler helped the Obama campaign raise up to a half-million dollars in 2012. In 2011, Comcast executive David L. Cohen hosted a dinner with a minimum donation of $10,000 to Obama's campaign. President Obama met with Cohen so many times in the run-up to the 2012 election he joked that, President Obama implored the commission to reclassify the Internet Service Providers as Title II utilities today, anyway.

"The Internet has been one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known," he wrote. "The FCC was chartered to promote competition, innovation, and investment in our networks. In service of that mission, there is no higher calling than protecting an open, accessible, and free Internet."

Almost every other consumer-focused news outlet has voiced support of the designation. "Providers would be stuck allowing consumers to use the internet as they want to, using whatever services they like without any penalty," The Verge wrote today. "If that sounds pretty great, it's because that's basically how the internet has worked up until now."

A record four million public comments came out in opposition to the "slow lane," but indications pointed to the commission passing the new rules anyway. One of Comcast's chief lobbyists when the rules were proposed in April—then Senior VP of Government Affairs Meredith Baker—was an FCC commissioner immediately beforehand. Current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was the President of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, cable's biggest lobby, before taking the position. As Esquire.com reported in July, Comcast had even worked with think tanks like AEI to help astroturf support for the less than one percent of comments that supported artificial slowing of traffic, and publish white papers on websites for places like the Wall Street Journal and U.S. News and World Report.

Today, the President asked his commissioners to disregard all of it and scrap the plan that had been heavily supported by lobbyists but reviled by the public. "I thank the Commissioners for having served this cause with distinction and integrity," he wrote. "And I respectfully ask them to adopt the policies I have outlined here, to preserve this technology's promise for today, and future generations to come."

The record response to the proposed rules was spurred on by a Last Week Tonight with John Oliversegment that outlined the commission's ties to the cable lobby. The call to file a public comment voicing opposition to the new rules repeatedly crashed the servers at the FCC's website.

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If the FCC drops its plans and takes Obama's lead, the petition and its four million signatures will have worked.

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