House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) picked up Monday where he left off Friday, criticizing the FCC's Feb. 26 vote to reclassify Internet access providers under Title II regulation as common carriers and saying Federal Communications chairman Tom Wheeler was still not talking about taking that step last November, or at least not to him.

At a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on March 2, Walden said the FCC had stepped "well beyond its authority" in  "recasting the Internet as a public utility and supplanting the decisions of state and local elected officials whether to invest tax dollars in broadband with the FCC’s

central economic planning." The "central planning" reference was to the FCC's decision, on the same day, to preempt state laws limiting municipal broadband buildouts in Tennessee and North Carolina.

That is according to a prepared text supplied by Walden's office.

As to the timing of the chairman's pivot away from his non-reclassification, Sec. 706 approach, Walden said "I met with Chairman Wheeler late last November. I reiterated congressional Republicans’ concerns with Title II and with regulating the most successful economic and regulatory

experiment in U.S. history. And in that meeting, Chairman Wheeler assured me that he was committed to net neutrality without reclassification of broadband. This stands in stark contrast to press reports of Chairman Wheeler’s “summer epiphany” and decision to impose net neutrality through reclassification as a telecommunications service. I would say that this action was curiously timed just after President Obama announced his support for Title II (Nov. 10).

Walden raised the timing issue in an interview Friday for C-SPAN's Communicators, but said only that the chairman had talked about light-touch regs. In Monday's speech he made clear that he was saying Wheeler indicated as late as November he was not going the Title II route.

Wheeler was out of the country Monday and unavailable for comment.  President Obama urged Wheeler to impose Title II, but the chairman has said it was always on the table and said last week after the vote that he came to the Title II conclusion independently and based on the record in the proceeding. That record included 4 million comments both for and against reclassification.

House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Communications chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) gave a shout out to private industry in the wake of the President's speech touting municipal broadband and federal preemption of state laws limiting it.

“With precious dollars already stretched thin, state and local officials know better than beltway bureaucrats what’s best for their communities. We should applaud and encourage private investment to develop state-of-the-art broadband networks,” they said in a statement.

“The Internet is a great American success story that gets better by the day because of the billions of dollars that are invested every year to expand and improve broadband access and speeds, and because of limited federal government interference. That private investment is the engine that drives Internet innovation and brings high-speed Internet access to every corner of our country – a goal we all share.”

The President traveled to Cedar Falls, Iowa, to promote high-speed broadband and the Cedar Falls Utilities municipal system's 1 gig service. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has also signaled that he wants a February vote on a couple of petitions my municipalities to preempt state laws, a vote that will likely be in support of those petitions.

“Cedar Falls is a success story," the legislators said, "but not all communities have seen the same results. The history of municipal Internet access is littered with many costly failures that no one wants to repeat. We urge the commission to work with Congress through our CommActUpdate process to improve our laws, promote continued investment in Internet infrastructure, and spur competition."