Tony Romm

As voters scrambled for new ways to raise their voices after Election Day, two Silicon Valley engineers introduced Resistbot — a tool that turns voters’ text messages into notes faxed directly to their members of Congress.

In the weeks after its March launch, Resistbot has spiked in popularity: Voters have sent roughly 800,000 pages’ worth of political opinions to their elected officials. And the flood of activity has come as its creators embark on an expansion, far beyond faxes to Capitol Hill. Beginning in April, Resistbot users can share their views about health care, immigration, taxes or anything else not just with congressional lawmakers but also state governors and local newspapers, according to one of its founders, Jason Putorti, who spoke with Recode this week.

Large tech companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft focused some of their lobbying dollars in Washington over the past three months on combating President Donald Trump, as he eyed major changes to the US tax code and imposed new restrictions on foreign immigrants. Both issues feature prominently on many companies’ first-quarter lobbying reports. In total, five of the industry’s biggest names — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — spent a combined $13.3 million to influence regulators in the nation’s capital between Jan. 1 and March 31, records show.

Facebook specifically revealed it devoted a portion of its $3.2 million in spending during that period to fighting President Trump’s executive order limiting travelers and refugees from some Muslim-majority countries. The social giant, like many in Silicon Valley, has blasted the order publicly and signed onto legal briefs challenging the administration’s actions. Google, too, spent some of its $3.5 million in lobbying on “legislative responses” to Trump’s travel ban.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai visited executives at Facebook, Oracle, Intel and other tech giants in Silicon Valley on April 17, as he considers how he might rethink and replace the agency’s hotly contested network neutrality rules. Speaking to reporters April 20, Chairman Pai stressed he’s been “consistent” in his view that he “favor[s] a free and open internet and that I oppose Title II,” a reference to the portion of law that Democrats tapped in order to subject the likes of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to utility-like regulation. “Outside of the context of any pending proceeding, I’ve been simply soliciting thoughts on how to secure the online consumer protections that people have talked about,” Chairman Pai said. A spokesman for Chairman Pai did not immediately respond to a request for more details about the meeting. Chairman Pai himself did not provide further information about his consultations when asked at a press conference following a series of votes April 20 that relaxed regulations on the telecom industry.

The Internet Association -- a lobbying group representing Facebook, Google, Twitter and other web giants -- told the Federal Communications Commission that the Commission shouldn’t weaken network neutrality rules — an early warning shot at the ideas contemplated by the agency’s new Republican chairman, Ajit Pai.

Under Pai’s draft plan, which he has not yet presented publicly, internet providers like AT&T, Comcast, Charter and Verizon could soon escape tough regulation: They would only have to promise in writing that they won’t block web pages or slow down their competitors’ traffic, sources have said. Such a voluntary system is a stark departure from the strict rules imposed by the Obama administration, however, and it prompted the Internet Association to tell Chairman Pai privately that it has its doubts. “The internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition and innovation online,” the group said. “In other words, existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept intact.” The group added that net neutrality should continue to be “enforced by the expert agency, namely the FCC.”

Silicon Valley is already rebelling against a plan by Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai that would cancel the government’s network neutrality rules — and perhaps leave it to telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast to decide whether to adhere to open internet principles. "I think in practice, it goes against everything we would want in strong net neutrality protections,” said Evan Engstrom, the executive director of Engine. The group works with startups on policy issues in San Francisco (CA). As a result, Engstrom said he expected a “similar level of engagement that we saw the last time around when we had to fight” — a vicious rhetorical war that drew even John Oliver into the fray. And he said the tech industry again would “do everything we can to rally the community and the public.”

To that end, one of the Valley’s lobbying voices in Washington, the Internet Association, will share its views privately with Chairman Pai at the FCC the week of April 10, apparently. The group, which represents the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter, declined to comment on the meeting. In a statement, though, a spokesman for the Internet Association said, “Internet companies are ready to fight to maintain strong net neutrality protections in any forum. ISPs must not be allowed to meddle with people’s right to access content and services online and efforts to weaken net neutrality rules are bad for consumers and innovation.”

Roku appears to be arming itself for the coming network neutrality war. Roku has hired a pair of Republican lobbyists through an outside government-affairs firm, according to a federal ethics reports, specifically to focus on net neutrality. It’s the first time the company has ever retained lobbyists in Washington, DC.

For years, Netflix had been a primary political player in this fight, as a public advocate for strong open internet rules that sparred openly with the likes of Comcast. As Netflix has struck deals with the cable giant and others to speed up its traffic, however, the streaming company has tempered its tone. Enter Roku, which, unlike Netflix, soon may find reason to be even more vocal in the debate: The company is considering whether it should launch an over-the-top pay TV service, apparently. In other words, it increasingly could find itself in direct competition with internet providers.

Two companies, Comcast and AT&T, each tried on March 31 to mount a defense of their intense lobbying campaign to undo the Federal Communications Commission’s rules, which would have required the industry to seek customers’ permission before collecting consumers’ web browsing history and selling that to third parties, like advertisers. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the reversal into law in the coming days. In a blog post, Gerard Lewis, the chief privacy officer for Comcast, stressed: “We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual web browsing history. We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so.”

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trevor Loudon, author of "Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress,” said: “The media is totally against the president. Hollywood is against the president. The radical left is against the president. He’s got all these forces against him. What we have is social media.” His call to action: “Get on Facebook, get on Twitter, and stand up.”

Ginni Thomas, the conservative journalist and activist (and, yes, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) said that given her “reverence for social media that gives us the power beyond the propaganda media to find the truth,” she was going to have speakers take turns "in order of who has the most Twitter followers." First up, with more than half a million followers: Milwaukee County Sheriff and conservative icon David Clarke. Going last, after Loudon (8,100 followers) and the Center for Security Policy’s Clare Lopez (6,100), was acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen (3,900).

Although Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai believes there’s market failure in the prison phone call industry, the FCC’s “well-intentioned efforts have not been fully consistent with the law,” the agency’s acting general counsel told lawmakers in a letter Feb 21.

Citing the reality that the commission’s current Republican leadership disagreed with parts of the FCC’s 2015 reforms, agency attorneys abandoned defense of rate regulation of in-state phone calls in a lawsuit brought by major prison phone providers. Acting general counsel Brendan Carr pointed out that the FCC still moved forward with oral arguments, and defended the agency’s authority to cap interstate rates and efforts to curb fees. “If the court ultimately agrees with the positions the FCC defended at oral argument, the result could go a long way in helping to reduce the rates and fees associated with inmate calling services,” Carr wrote in response to a letter from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and other Democrats.

President Donald Trump sent a number of tweets to the 23.5 million followers of his personal Twitter account. But they didn’t show up in the tweets of his official Twitter handle @POTUS — raising questions about whether those messages from the most powerful man on Earth will be archived for posterity. Because some of Trump's headline-grabbing, market-moving tweets might never become part of the presidential history books, archivists fear that Americans could be left with an incomplete record of how the United States was governed in the Trump era.