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Imagine a world where you can buy a few hours worth of streaming audio or add unlimited e-mail but only a modest amount of data for other purposes. That’s just the kind of world being created by a Marc Andreessen-backed startup called ItsOn.

The company’s main business plan is selling systems to carriers that would let them offer these kinds of services. However, to get that business off the ground, ItsOn felt like it needed to create its own service. So the company is announcing Zact, a consumer cellphone service designed to be cheaper and far more flexible than others on the market. “We need to do a service and become our own customers to show what’s possible,” ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh. Whether you want to give your kid more texts, boost your data plan or drop your ex from the account, all these kinds of options can be changed from the phone and on the fly. Want to buy just an hour of video or a month’s worth of email? You can do that, as well. And if the plan you pick is more than you need, Zact will refund the difference between that plan and the least expensive one that would have matched your usage.

Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA) had long been the rare technologist in the House of Representatives’ crop of lawyers from “small law firms,” as Rep Issa has described his colleagues.

Of the 39 members of the House Judiciary Committee, 31 were trained as attorneys. Rep Issa was the bright white swatch of paint that reveals how off-white the walls have been all along. During the efforts to stop the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Rep repeatedly cited the objections of the Internet’s architects, enumerated the damage the bill could do to the medium’s interlocking parts, and defined its existential threat to the vibrancy of the digital economy. He was, in short, a pain in the side of the House’s Republican leadership, which badly wanted to be able to get back to the time when it could just leave worries over the esoteric enforcement of copyright on the Internet to its Judiciary chairman, and SOPA’s sponsor in Congress, Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX). In SOPA’s wake, if there was a Declaration of Internet Freedom that needed early endorsers, Rep Issa was there to put his name to it. If there was an Internet Defense League to be launched, sign Rep Darrell Issa up. If there was an “Internet Freedom” plank to be slipped into the 2012 Republican presidential platform, Rep Darrell Issa was there to shepherd it. Issa emerged as someone those who cherish the Internet hadn’t yet found in Washington – a compatriot who not only understood the digitally networked realm, but one who had enough institutional might and political savvy to elevate its defense to the level of a national cause. Issa was ready to be the Internet advocates’ friend. They’re beginning to wonder exactly what kind of friend they’ve gotten.

Mediacom chairman Rocco Commisso isn't ready to embrace Sen. John McCain's proposal of full-blown a la carte, but has a pat on the back for the Arizona Republican's identification of wholesale distributors (programmers) rather than retailers (cable operators) as the cause of what both Commisso and McCain argue is a broken marketplace. "While I do not think that a 'full' a la carte system - voluntary or mandatory - is necessarily desirable or viable, action that will compel programmers to allow cable companies greater control over how networks are offered would be highly beneficial for consumers," Commisso wrote to Sen McCain and members of the Senate Commerce Committee.