Haley Sweetland Edwards

It’s really difficult to fire a bad teacher. A group of Silicon Valley investors wants to change that

On a warm day in early June, a Los Angeles County trial-court judge, Rolf M. Treu, pink-cheeked beneath a trim white beard, dropped a bombshell on the American public-school system. Ruling in Vergara v. California, Treu struck down five decades-old California laws governing teacher tenure and other job protections on the grounds that they violate the state’s constitution.

In his 4,000-word decision, he bounded through an unusually short explanation of what was an unprecedented interpretation of the law. Step 1: Tenure and other job protections make it harder to fire teachers and therefore effectively work to keep bad ones in the classroom. Step 2: Bad teachers “substantially undermine” a child’s education. That, Treu wrote, not only “shocks the conscience” but also violates the students’ right to a “basic equality of educational opportunity” as enshrined in California’s constitution.

It was the first time, in California or anywhere else, that a court had linked the quality of a teacher, as measured by student test scores, to a pupil’s right to an education. What happened next was predictable: the educational establishment hit DEFCON 1. State and national teachers’ unions decried the ruling as part of a subversive effort to destroy labor unions and pointed, truthfully, to the fact that the lawsuit was launched and underwritten by a Silicon Valley muckety-muck who lives in one of the fanciest ZIP codes in America. Others painted Treu, who was appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, as a brazen partisan. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former D.C. chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee praised the decision for challenging the “broken status quo.” Other education reformers, including former CNN anchor turned education activist Campbell Brown, pronounced it the most important civil rights suit in decades and filed two copycat cases in New York.

On some level, these reactions were premature. Treu’s decision holds no precedent-setting power and won’t affect any California law unless an appeals court upholds the ruling sometime next year. Both the state and the teachers’ unions have appealed and are awaiting a trial date. But on another level, the Vergara case is a powerful proxy for a broader war over the future of education in this country. The reform movement today is led not by grassroots activists or union leaders but by Silicon Valley business types and billionaires. It is fought not through ballot boxes or on the floors of hamstrung state legislatures but in closed-door meetings and at courthouses. And it will not be won incrementally, through painstaking compromise with multiple stakeholders, but through sweeping decisions–judicial and otherwise–made possible by the tactical application of vast personal fortunes.

It is a reflection of our politics that no one elected these men to take on the knotty problem of fixing our public schools, but here they are anyway, fighting for what they firmly believe is in the public interest. David Welch, the 53-year-old engineer and businessman behind Vergara, is the least well known of a half-dozen tech titans who are making the repair of public education something of a second career. In the past 15 years, Microsoft’s Bill Gates has poured billions into everything from helping states write and implement the Common Core State Standards to building a new history curriculum. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has dropped $220 million on public schools in Newark, N.J., and the San Francisco Bay Area, while Netflix’s Reed Hastings has spent millions more on buttressing the charter-school movement in California and beyond. For the past four years, PayPal’s Peter Thiel has been divvying out dozens of $100,000 “scholarships” to kids who are willing to ditch university in favor of “self-education.”

This latest batch of tech tycoons turned education reformers follows in the footsteps of a long line of older magnates, from the Carnegies and Rockefellers to Walmart’s Waltons, who have also funneled their fortunes into education-reform projects built on private-sector management strategies. While this newer class of tech philanthropists are in some ways similar to the older generation, they also come to school reform having been steeped in the uniquely modern, libertarian, free-market Wild West of tech entrepreneurship–a world where data and innovation are king, disruption is a way of life, and the gridlock and rules of modern politics are regarded as a kind of kryptonite to how society ought to be.

“Life in a Silicon Valley operation is, O.K., we need to change something. How do I create an agent of change?” Welch explains, sitting in a windowless boardroom at the Cupertino, Calif., headquarters of his company, Infinera, which makes fiber-optic communications technology. “But here you have the most important aspect of society, in my mind at least–the ability to educate our children–and it’s incapable of change. It’s failing, and it doesn’t want to acknowledge that it’s failing, much less do anything about it.”

“Why Isn’t Anyone Fixing This?”

Of all the Silicon Valley tycoons you might expect to make headlines, Welch is near the bottom of the list. Even in the geeky back alleys of Palo Alto, his name doesn’t always ring a bell. He doesn’t give TED talks, he doesn’t headline coding conferences, and his company is hardly a well-known brand. The unassuming father of three, who has bushy eyebrows and the well-ironed, air-conditioned look of the well-to-do, earned a Ph.D. from Cornell in electrical engineering and made his many millions working at two startups in Silicon Valley. Neither a Democrat nor a Republican, he clearly prefers a world of concrete facts to taking sides. “I don’t believe in putting on a jacket that says I’m red or blue,” he says. “I believe in identifying the topics that are important to me and then figuring out the right way to talk about them.”

As the youngest of seven children growing up outside Annapolis, Md., Welch went to public school and then to the University of Delaware. He didn’t think much about how the system actually functioned, or malfunctioned, until his own children were born in the ’90s and went on to have “some public experiences and some private-school experiences.” (Welch, as a rule, doesn’t talk about his children’s lives.) He then became involved in the NewSchools Venture Fund, which invests in charter schools and other entrepreneur-led education ventures targeting under-served students, and StudentsFirst, the controversial nonprofit founded by Michelle Rhee. But even by the early 2000s he’d homed in on what he saw as the root of the systemic failure of California’s public schools: the state’s laws on teacher tenure and other job protections, which are among the strictest in the country.

It seemed crazy to Welch that teachers in California receive tenure–permanent employment status designed to protect them from unfair dismissal–after less than two years on the job and that principals are often required to lay off the least experienced teachers first, no matter which ones are the best. It seemed even crazier to him that in some districts it takes years and tens of thousands of dollars to fire a teacher who isn’t doing a good job. Welch remembers asking a big-city California superintendent to tell him the one thing he needed to improve the public-school system. The answer blew Welch away. The educator didn’t ask for more money or more iPads. “He said, ‘Give me control over my workforce,'” Welch said. “It just made so much sense. I thought, Why isn’t anyone doing something about that? Why isn’t anyone fixing this?”

In early 2010, Welch decided, as he puts it, to “jump off the cliff” and do something about it. His first move was to meet with Kathleen Sullivan, a constitutional lawyer whose name is sometimes whispered to be on the Democrats’ short list of nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court. He pitched her what was at the time a rather unformed idea. “I said, ‘Here’s my premise–if children are being harmed by these laws, then something, somewhere, is being done that’s illegal,'” Welch says. After about six months, Sullivan and a small team of lawyers in San Francisco delivered a draft of the legal theory that would become the foundation for Vergara.

Welch’s next move, in April 2011, was to hire a jack-of-all-trades public relations firm, which is now called Rally. It launched a nonprofit, Students Matter–branded in the bright yellow and black of a No. 2 pencil–that was tasked with two missions. The first was to build a coalition of supporters and funders and create a public campaign surrounding the case. The second was to find a team of lawyers who were willing to reverse engineer a lawsuit on the basis of an untested legal theory on behalf of plaintiffs who didn’t yet exist.

Building on Brown

Before states began passing tenure laws in the early 20th century, a teacher could be fired for holding unorthodox political views or attending the wrong church, or for no reason at all if the local party boss wanted to pass on the job to someone else. But what began as a popular idea has become increasingly controversial as countless stories of schools and districts being unable to fire bad teachers have populated the news. In a story that hit headlines in 2009, the L.A. Unified School District was legally barred from firing a teacher who told an eighth-grade student who had recently tried to slit his own wrists to “carve deeper next time.” Episodes like that help explain why even in California, where the electorate votes overwhelmingly Democratic and is often sympathetic to unions, recent polls show that voters are skeptical of tenure.

Part of Students Matter’s job was to take this commonly held but abstract idea–that tenure and other job protections do not serve the public-school system–and essentially personify it in the form of students on whose behalf the case would be filed. Among the nine plaintiffs, who ranged from elementary-school to high-school age, were Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara, sisters from Pacoima, Calif., who were 15 and 16 years old when they took the witness stand this year. Beatriz, the lead plaintiff, testified about three of her middle-school teachers, describing them as apathetic, verbally abusive or simply ineffective. “It was always loud in there, and [he] would even sleep during class,” Beatriz said of her sixth-grade math teacher. “He didn’t even teach, and he couldn’t control his class. I couldn’t hear anything because of how loud it was.”

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a white-shoe firm based in Los Angeles, then built the case on a foundation of Brown v. Board of Education–the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that separate is not equal–and California Supreme Court cases from the 1970s and 1990s. Each of the California cases interpreted the equal-protection clause in the state constitution to mean that one group of students should not receive an education inferior to that offered to another group. For example, in a 1992 case, Butt v. State of California, the California Supreme Court found that when a school district with a budget shortfall decided to save money by dismissing students for summer vacation six weeks early, it violated the state constitution, since students at the schools with the shorter school year received an education that was inferior to that of students at schools with full school years.

The argument in Vergara v. California took that same idea but added a controversial twist. Instead of examining the equality of students’ educational opportunities by comparing discrete facts–like the amount of time spent in class or the amount of funding a school receives per student–Welch’s lawyers made the case that the court should compare the quality of students’ in-class learning experiences. They argued that students who are stuck in classrooms with bad teachers receive an education that is substantially inferior to that of students who are in classrooms with good teachers. Laws that keep bad teachers in the classroom, they concluded, therefore violate the equal-protection clause of the state constitution. They also argued that poor and minority students, who are more likely to be in classrooms with bad teachers, endure a disproportionate burden, making the issue a matter of civil rights as well.

Happily for Welch’s lawyers, their innovative argument happened to coincide with a flood of new academic research on teacher quality that could serve as evidence in court. A three-year study led by Harvard education expert Thomas Kane, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that a bad teacher, as measured by his or her students’ test scores, could set a student’s educational progress back by 9.54 months. In December 2011, another study, by Harvard University’s Raj Chetty and John Friedman with Columbia University’s Jonah Rockoff, looked at school records, test scores and tax returns for 2.5 million children and young adults from the past two decades. Using a controversial tool called value-added measures (VAM) to control for factors like race and poverty rates, they found that replacing a poorly performing teacher with an excellent one could increase students’ lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom. “The fact that we could show how students were actually harmed by bad teachers–that changed the argument,” says Marcellus McRae, an attorney on the case.

The Vergara trial began in January of this year and stretched over two months in court. More than a few times, teachers and administrators called by the defense to represent the position of the teachers’ unions found themselves in cross-examination inadvertently buttressing Students Matter’s case instead. As Judge Treu later noted, nearly every witness agreed under oath that competent teachers are among the most important components of a child’s in-school educational experience and that “grossly ineffective teachers substantially undermine the ability of that child to succeed in school.” The trial ended March 27, and on June 10, Treu handed down his tentative decision.

In his 19 years on the bench, Treu’s opinions rarely made news, but this one would be an exception. If roughly 1% to 3% of California teachers are in the bottom 5% of competence, Treu wrote, citing witness testimony, that means there are between 2,750 and 8,250 such teachers currently in California classrooms. That population, Treu wrote, “has a direct, real, appreciable and negative impact on a significant number of California students, now and well into the future for as long as said teachers hold their positions.” In the law office near the courthouse, Welch and dozens of supporters erupted in celebration, hugging and kissing and crying.

What Comes Next?

The Vergara decision has been the source of outsize drama in California’s election cycle this year, playing out on stages both small and large. The battle for state superintendent of public instruction–not the kind of race that usually garners the big bucks–has already attracted as much as $10 million from state and national teachers’ unions on one side and wealthy donors on the other. Union-backed incumbent Tom Torlakson, who has decried the Vergara decision as a soulless attack on teachers and vowed to see it overturned on appeal, is now within a hairbreadth of losing to Marshall Tuck, a Silicon Valley–backed reformer, who has celebrated Vergara as a major win for California kids. Tuck’s deep-pocketed supporters spent $4.5 million in just the first two weeks of October. Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown, who is up for re-election in November and counts the teachers’ unions among his biggest political backers, has negotiated a careful middle road. While he has dutifully appealed Treu’s decision in the case, he was careful to avoid earning the ire of the Silicon Valley set. “Changes of this magnitude, as a matter of law and policy, require appellate review,” Brown’s office wrote in the notice of appeal, an exercise in blandness.

But the Vergara case, despite topping out–so far–in a lowly state trial court, reaches well beyond California’s border. In New York, Campbell Brown’s Vergara-style lawsuit, along with a similar suit filed by the New York City Parents Union, has become yet another political lightning rod and ignited discussions among activists who are impatient to file a similar case in other states like Connecticut, Oregon and New Jersey.

The debate over Vergara and its copycats highlights the broader landscape of education reform in a time of highly polarized politics, gridlocked legislatures and soaring inequality. When traditional avenues of reform seem increasingly impassable, those with vast amounts of money or simply an ingenious legal theory–or both–can seem like the only forces capable of effecting change. Some, like Welch, believe that’s part of the natural growth, disruption and innovation of a healthy society, and he applauds the “bold actions” of the wealthy few. “Thank God that people like Bill Gates and the Walton family feel the moral responsibility to put their assets toward what they think is right,” he says.

But others worry that the means of reform are as important as the ends. Michael Petrilli, who runs the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, says that while he generally does not support teacher tenure and job-protection laws, he is concerned that the recent spate of education litigation in California and New York sets an adversarial tone at a time when reformers need teachers to buy into other large-scale reform efforts, like implementing the Common Core State Standards in classrooms. Fellow conservative Michael McShane, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, also pointed to the problem of using litigation to solve civil rights issues. “Courts are really good at saying, ‘That’s unconstitutional. It’s out,'” McShane says, but in the wake of such decisions, there’s usually a flood of related cases that require the courts to act as arbiter of the minutiae of a developing policy. “If it’s now unconstitutional to allow a ‘grossly ineffective’ teacher in the classroom, then that raises more questions. How do you define ‘grossly ineffective’? Using what measures?” After all, judging a teacher’s quality can be tricky business. During the Vergara trial, one of the plaintiffs described her middle-school teacher as ineffective and undeserving of tenure; that same teacher had been previously named Pasadena’s Teacher of the Year.

Testing Wars

The question of how to judge a teacher’s value gets to a fundamental irony in the national war over education reform today. Welch’s unexpected victory in Vergara, which hinges on the necessity–and feasibility–of measuring a teacher’s effectiveness, comes just as a broad range of educational experts have begun to question the validity of the tests and evaluations on which those teacher-effectiveness measures are based.

American policymakers’ love affair with quantitative accountability tools is relatively new. It wasn’t until 1994 that the Clinton Administration began requiring states to develop their own standardized tests for some subjects, and in the early 2000s, President George W. Bush doubled down on that initiative with No Child Left Behind. The Obama Administration built on that foundation, using Race to the Top funds and No Child Left Behind waivers to encourage states to use test scores to evaluate teacher performance. Today, most states have teacher evaluations that already are or may soon be tied to tenure, layoff decisions and merit-pay bonuses.

This two-decade trend has not, of course, been free of controversy. But what began with protests over “high-stakes testing” and cheating scandals in various public-school districts in the mid-2000s has morphed in the past six months into an outright mutiny, driven in large part by the controversial rollout of Common Core State Standards, which are linked to new state curriculums, more-difficult tests and new teacher evaluations. Teachers in Florida, Colorado, New York, Texas and Tennessee have filed lawsuits against their states, alleging unfair testing expectations; in New Mexico, teachers have burned their evaluations in protest, demanding better in-class support and job training instead. Many argued that policies focusing on cold, statistical measures fail to take into account the messy, chaotic reality of teaching in communities where kids must contend with poverty and violence.

A growing number of studies appear to support that point of view. In April, the American Statistical Association released a statement questioning whether VAM, the methodology that undergirds the Chetty study, adequately measures a teacher’s total value to a student’s education. In May, the American Educational Research Association found a “surprisingly weak” correlation between teachers’ VAM scores and their actual skills, as evaluated by surveys and expert observations. In July, the Department of Education found that VAM scores varied wildly depending on what time of day tests were administered or whether the kids were distracted. Even the Silicon Valley reformers appear willing to dial back the emphasis on testing and evaluations, at least for a bit. In June, the Gates Foundation called for a moratorium on tying consequences to evaluations based on Common Core standards until 2016, and in August, the Education Department announced that states could delay using student test scores in teacher evaluations for two years. This month, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools called for state and district leaders to cut back on unnecessary testing and test preparation.

David Welch says he’s undeterred. While he’s received an informal crash course in the unforgiving politics of education reform in this country in the past year, the back-and-forth doesn’t interest him. “I look at this as my responsibility to help and improve the society I live in,” he says. “And I’m willing to fight that battle as long as I have to fight that battle.”

Warren didn't touch the question of whether she would run in 2016

Correction appended Sept. 17 at 2:40 p.m.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and personal finance expert Suze Orman teamed up Wednesday morning for a spirited, hour-long discussion about student loans, for-profit colleges and the staggering debt crisis facing tens of millions of Americans today.

The two women, who first met at a 2009 TIME 100 event, clearly saw eye-to-eye on nearly every issue, surprising absolutely no one, anywhere. They often echoed one another in their condemnation of “the biggest banks,” “the crooks” selling exploitative student loans, and corporate control over the lawmaking process.

“Washington works for those who have money and power, for those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers,” Warren said.

“Private banks are financially raping—and I use that word truthfully—raping our children,” Orman said. “It’s ludicrous.”

The question of whether Warren will run for president in 2016 was defused right off the bat, when Orman jokingly announced her own candidacy. Warren remained silent on the issue throughout the panel discussion, hosted by Politico and Starbucks in downtown Washington, D.C., choosing instead to draw attention to her student loan reform bill, which was blocked by a Republican filibuster in June.

The bill would require the federal government and private banks to allow the roughly 25 million Americans, each of whom carry an average of $30,000 in student debt, to refinance their student loans at today’s lower interest rates. It would also cap undergraduate loans at interest rates below 4%. The current interest rate for federal Stafford student loans is as high as 8%; private loan rates often top 14%.

Warren and Orman argued that since Americans collectively carry more than $1.2 trillion in student debt alone—a sum that doesn’t take into account mortgages or other personal debt—they cannot buy houses or cars or make other purchases that would stimulate the economy. Senate Republicans blocked another effort to bring the bill to vote on Tuesday. Warren promised Wednesday to “keep hitting at” it this term.

Both Warren and Orman pointed out repeatedly that student loans, unlike any other type of loan, cannot be forgiven under any circumstances, including bankruptcy or death. Those carrying student debt through retirement “will have their social security garnished,” Orman said, as an appalled Warren echoed her: “Your social security check gets garnished!” Americans who die with student loans often pass on that debt to surviving family members.

One of the challenges in passing the student loan reform bill, Warren said, is that the U.S. government mades $66 billion between 2007 and 2012 off of the interest from federally-backed student loans. Her bill would reduce that profit substantially, but proposes making up the difference through a stipulation in the tax code requiring that those making more than a million dollars per year pay taxes at the same rate middle class families pay, she said.

Toward the end of the discussion, the moderators, Politico’s Mike Allen and Maggie Haberman, changed the topic to the upcoming 2014 and 2016 elections. Orman said that while she would vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would much prefer to vote for Warren, who she described as her “political voice.” Warren smiled but didn’t respond.

Allen later asked Warren who her favorite Republican is, to which Warren quickly answered, much to the delight of the crowd, “Living or dead?” When Allen pressed her to come up with her favorite living Republican, Warren suggested Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who voted to advance debate of the student loan reform bill and is working on housing finance reform.

Allen later asked Warren what her reaction would be if Republicans win the majority in the Senate in November, and Mitch McConnell, who is facing a tight race in Kentucky, succeeds and rises to Senate majority leader. “I’ll be blunt,” Warren said. “I hope that he doesn’t come back.”

In one of the final questions, Haberman asked Warren which Republican she would like to see run in 2016. Warren just laughed. “No,” she said. “No.”

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly said that Sen. Bob Corker voted for the loan reform bill. He voted to advance debate of the bill.

HBO Go may soon be available to non-cable-TV subscribers as an online-only streaming product, just like Netflix. That’s cause for celebration for Game of Thrones fans, many of whom have been, ahem, “borrowing” a cable login from their friend’s room mate’s dad for the last few years, or outright pirating the goods on Sunday nights.

The move marks a major sea change for the TV industry. For the last year, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that HBO Go would become available on online-only streaming platforms. But at a Goldman Sachs communications conference last week, he said he was rethinking it. “Up until now” the idea wasn’t attractive, he said, but now that “the broadband opportunity is getting bigger,” it’s becoming “more viable and more interesting.”

Bewkes’ suggestion has ignited a debate among TV-industry insiders: Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional pay-TV model? If HBO goes the Netflix route, what’s to stop ESPN or Discovery or the Food Channel from following suit? And is this a nail in the coffin of “TV Everywhere,” the pay-TV industry’s online streaming collaboration that Bewkes himself has proudly backed?

The short answer to all those questions is that the doomsayers are generally right: the traditional pay-TV model—wherein customers are prodded into paying upwards of $150 a month for a bundle of thousands of channels they don’t watch—will meet increasingly steep resistance in coming years. After all, we live in world where we’ve all become accustomed to getting our media (songs, magazine articles, you name it) on-demand and a la carte. And if HBO Go and Showtime actually do “go rogue,” so to speak, it does amount to a major blow to the joint “TV Everywhere” campaign, which was designed to keep pay-TV subscribers loyal to their TV providers by allowing them to watch TV online through any device they wanted, but only after signing in through a pay-TV portal. Those customers who were paying for cable primarily to watch HBO will no longer have a reason to pay for traditional TV at all.

But the longer answer is that while we are undoubtedly standing on the precipice of major changes in the traditional pay-TV business model, the biggest players in both the TV distribution and programming markets are hardly in existential crisis.

For one, all the biggest cable and fiber companies—Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter, Verizon—are actually poised to benefit from Americans’ increasing demand for online streaming, a service that requires super-fast Internet connections. Unlike satellite TV companies, like Dish and DirecTV, which for technical reasons cannot offer fast, affordable broadband Internet, and are therefore most effected by the trend toward online video consumption, big cable companies have actually seen their total profits sky rocket in recent years, driven largely by broadband subscribers in search of the fastest-available service. Comcast in particular is in the cat-bird seat. If regulators approve its proposed $45.2 billion merger withTime Warner Cable this year, the new Comcast could control up to 70% of all the broadband Internet connections in the country that are fast enough to replace a household’s TV—i.e., to stream several HD videos simultaneously.

For another, even if HBO Go goes the way of Netflix tomorrow, the move is unlikely to catalyze a similar mass exodus among other smaller channels immediately, since they are unlikely to find in direct streaming the sort of revenue they can get from on the traditional pay-TV model. Even the biggest programmers, like Disney and Viacom, still make the bulk of their revenue from partnering with pay-TV distributors, like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, which pay them large “retransmission fees” to license their content. For example, pay-TV companies currently pay ESPN, which is owned by Disney, an average of about $7 per cable subscriber per month, even though the overwhelming majority of all pay-TV customers don’t even watch ESPN.

The TV distributors, meanwhile, still have the potential ability to punish smaller channels if they find other routes for distribution. As it stands, licensing agreements usually include language that limits a programmer’s ability to make its content available online. For smaller stations that stray, big pay-TV companies can try to reduce the amount they pay a programmer in retrans fees, thus levying a significant blow to a programmers’ revenue stream. Big pay-TV companies, like Comcast, which already controls access to more than 20 million households, can also “punish” a programmer by moving its channels from a popular bundle to another, less popular bundle in their pay-TV offerings. A demotion like that would have the effect of decimating the number of people who see a programmer’s content, which in turn, would wreak havoc on its advertising revenue.

Of course, as more and more people begin to stream online video, the power dynamic between programmers and pay-TV distributors will shift. Already, online video consumption grew by 71% in the U.S. between 2012 and 2013, according to Nielsen. And while the number of outright “cord-cutters”—customers who ditched their pay-TV bill completely in favor of streaming services—is still less than 5% of the population, it’s growing every year. According to a study released last week, 49% of TV watchers between the ages of 25 and 34 say they’re “likely” to stop paying for cable TV in the next year. A ClearVoice Research study this week indicates that one in eight users plan to discontinue their cable service; 74% plan to do so this year.

A particularly timely finding, as the public comment period for Federal Communications Commission's proposed rule on net neutrality draws to a close

Two-thirds of Americans don’t like the idea of big web companies paying Internet service providers (ISPs) to deliver their content more quickly via so-called “fast lanes” on the Internet, according to a recent poll.

CALinnovates, a San Francisco-based coalition that works on public policy in technology, asked people earlier this month about whether they thought rules should be in place “prioritizing Internet traffic – such as one company willing to pay over another.” Well over half of the respondents–63%–replied either that all traffic should be treated equally or, if priority gets placed, the reason behind the prioritization shouldn’t be because one company pays for it.

The results of the poll, released Thursday, arrive just as the end of the public comment period draws near for the Federal Communications Commission’s sharply criticized proposed rule on net neutrality, the idea that ISPs cannot discriminate against certain web content. The deadline is Sept. 15.

The FCC’s proposed rule on net neutrality has come under fire in recent months, resulting in the Commission’s receipt of a record-breaking 1.4 million public comments.

On Sept. 10, a coalition of tech companies, consumer advocates and public policy groups organized a “day of action” called Battle for the Net, in protest of the FCC’s proposed rule, which generated nearly 2.5 million calls and emails to members of Congress and more than 700,000 comments to the FCC. That coalition advocates for the FCC to categorize ISPs under “Title II” of their statute, which would give the agency the legal jurisdiction to strictly regulate the broadband industry.

When it came to the concept of “net neutrality” within CALinnovate’s poll, however, Americans responded more ambivalently, CALInnovates Executive Director Mike Montgomery told TIME in a conference call. Two-thirds of those polled would like “new laws to deal with fast-paced changes that occur in technology,” but three-fourths weren’t sure the Federal government is capable of keeping up with the pace of technological innovation.

The Internet Association, an umbrella group that includes Google, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and other web giants, also opposes the FCC’s proposed rule, but like many of those polled by CALinnovates, stops short of advocating for a specific solution.

“Protecting an open Internet, free from discriminatory or anticompetitive actions by broadband gatekeepers should be the cornerstone of net neutrality policy,” said Michael Beckerman, the President and CEO of the Internet Association. “The FCC should leave all of its legal authorities on the table to accomplish this goal.”

But the war over internet freedom isn't over

A coalition of tech companies and Open Internet activists claimed victory Wednesday evening after a day-long campaign, Battle for the Net, succeeded in swamping the federal government with millions of public comments demanding that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) scrap its proposed rules governing net neutrality and write new ones.

By midday, members of Congress were receiving an average of 1,000 calls per minute, according to Free Press, a public advocacy organization that underwrote the campaign in support of net neutrality, the notion that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all web content equally.

The coalition of Internet activists that organized today’s campaign, Battle for the Net, includes 27 progressive advocacy organizations, including Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as dozens of tech companies, including Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, Kickstarter and Etsy. Vimeo, which is also a member, produced its own net neutrality video Wednesday.

Those companies, along with thousands of smaller websites, took part in a “day of action” Wednesday in which they displayed on their home pages an icon symbolizing a slow-loading website. When visitors click on that icon, they are invited to sign the Battle for the Net’s letter to the FCC and to contact their member of Congress.

The campaign used a nifty new technology that allowed visitors to simply type-in their phone number and zip code, and the app would figure out who their member of Congress was. Almost immediately, a visitor’s phone would start ringing and when they answered–presto!–they were already connected to their member of Congress’s office.

The pro-net neutrality campaign has drawn an enormous amount of attention from the large cable and telecom companies in recent weeks, no more so than Comcast, the biggest ISP in the country.

Comcast, which is hoping that the FCC and the Justice Department will approve it’s $45.2 billion merger with Time Warner Cable in the next few months, has gone out of its way to underscore its support for net neutrality.

“We want you to know that Comcast has no desire to break the Internet – or to do anything else to disturb its fundamental openness,” wrote David Cohen, a Comcast senior vice president in a press release Wednesday evening. “We support maintaining an open Internet, and a role for the FCC ensuring that.”

Open Internet advocates dismissed Cohen’s promises as spin, arguing that Comcast and the FCC are simply using a different definition of “net neutrality” so that they can claim to support it.

Battle for the Net, which was joined by the Internet Association–an umbrella group that includes Google, Amazon and Facebook–says that net neutrality is fundamentally incompatible with so-called “paid prioritization” deals, which allow wealthy companies to pay ISPs to deliver their content more quickly on “Internet fast lanes.”

The FCC’s proposed rules on net neutrality, which Comcast supports, allow for “paid prioritization” deals.

Top Congressional Democrats join a coalition of Internet businesses and activists in fighting to ensure Internet service providers treat all web content the same

As implementation of financial reform law continues

A top Federal Reserve official said Tuesday that regulators would spend the next year holding the biggest banks’ proverbial feet to the fire, while working to exempt small, community banks from regulatory requirements designed for the goliaths of Wall Street.

At a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo said regulators will require the nation’s biggest, riskiest financial institutions—those deemed Too Big To Fail—to maintain generous “crash pads” to protect against potential losses in the case of the next financial crisis.

Meanwhile, he said, small, community banks would not be subject to those same requirements and, in fact, should also be exempt of other, paperwork-heavy regulations under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, like the so-called Volcker Rule. Community banks’ “balance sheets are pretty easily investigated by us and their lending falls into discreet categories,” which makes many of the most burdensome regulations unnecessary, Tarullo said.

The biggest banks’ crash pads, known as “capital surcharges,” will exceed the minimal standards required by international regulators and may be as high as 3.5%, Tarullo said. Shares of the biggest banks, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which may find themselves subject to stricter requirements this year, dipped temporarily during Tarullo’s testimony, before climbing again and leveling off in the afternoon.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee’s top Republican, both returned repeatedly to the need to scale back the regulatory burden on small, community banks. “Too big to fail has become too small to succeed,” Heitkamp said.

Tarullo’s tough talk on big banks comes just a month after 11 of the biggest banks in the country failed to produce workable plans, known as “living wills,” designed to help regulators shut them down should they find themselves at the brink of collapse, as they did in 2008 and 2009. Living wills are necessary, the regulators said, so that the burden of bailing them out does not fall on taxpayers. In August, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. dismissed the 11 biggest banks’ living wills as “unrealistic” and grossly inadequate.

Tarullo was joined by Martin Gruenberg, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Tom Curry, the Comptroller of the Currency; Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Mary Jo White, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Tim Massad, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Those six top regulators are in charge of writing, implementing and enforcing the bulk of the 400 some-odd rules mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) applauded the assembled regulators for requiring the biggest banks to take seriously their living wills, but worried that, unless regulators are willing to “use the tools they have at their disposal”—like limiting banks’ growth—the biggest financial institutions will simply continue to drag their feet throughout the process. She wanted to make sure, she said, that “we’re not going to be back here a year from now having the same conversation.” Both Tarullo and Gruenberg insisted they would use their agencies’ “tools” to force banks to come up with workable living wills by next August.

What was perhaps the dramatic highlight of a rather staid three-hour hearing came in the last 20 minutes, when Warren, joined by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), demanded to know why regulators had failed to refer bank executives to the Department of Justice for prosecution for crimes committed in the lead-up to the financial crisis. During Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s, 800 executives were convicted and the FBI investigated 5,500, all on referrals from banking regulators, Warren said—whereas this time around, JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon actually received a $8.5 million raise after negotiating a successful settlement with the government.

“Banks have admitted to breaking the law and have settled with the U.S. for $35 billion dollars, but despite the misconduct at these banks, not a single senior executive… has been criminally prosecuted,” Warren said. “The message to every Wall Street banker is loud and clear: if you break the law, you will not go to jail, but you might end up with a much bigger pay check.”

Shelby, who had clearly been enjoying watching Warren berate the regulators, piped up. “People… whoever they are, shouldn’t be able to buy their way out of culpability, especially when it’s so strong it defies rationality,” he said, gesturing at Warren. “I agree with her on that.”