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Twitter expanded its Washington presence with the hire of William Carty, a longtime Republican aide on Capitol Hill. Carty began working for the Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee last year. Before that, he spent about 10 years as an aide on the House Commerce Committee. Carty will be just the second Twitter staffer working on public policy issues, joining Colin Crowell, a Democrat with experience at the Federal Communications Commission and on Capitol Hill.

Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute have informed AT&T that they intend to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against the wireless carrier for violating network neutrality rules.

The complaint will address AT&T’s plan to keep certain subscribers from using Apple’s FaceTime video calling on the AT&T cellular network. The move was expected, but the timing on when the FCC responds is unclear. AT&T justified this move in two ways: first it said by being open and transparent about the move it was following the rules that the FCC had implemented with regard to network neutrality on wireless networks. Two, it made a complicated argument around preloaded apps that basically boiled down to, “you can use anything you want on AT&T’s handsets over Wi-Fi, thus we aren’t blocking anything.” AT&T said it was not violating the Open Internet rules that forbid a carrier from blocking services that compete with its own services. This move is designed to do two things for AT&T. One, it pushes users to the newer shared data plans that help AT&T offset the loss in revenue from users deciding to dump texting and even voice plans. Two, it seeks to conflate Wi-Fi networks with cellular networks for purposes of abiding by the network neutrality rules.

[Commentary] On the most basic level, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is responsible for saving and creating 2.5 million jobs. The majority of economists agree that it helped the economy grow by as much as 3.8 percent, and kept the unemployment rate from reaching 12 percent.

The stimulus is the reason, in fact, that most Americans are better off than they were four years ago, when the economy was in serious danger of shutting down. But the stimulus did far more than stimulate: it protected the most vulnerable from the recession’s heavy winds. Of the act’s $840 billion final cost, $1.5 billion went to rent subsidies and emergency housing that kept 1.2 million people under roofs. (That’s why the recession didn’t produce rampant homelessness.) It increased spending on food stamps, unemployment benefits and Medicaid, keeping at least seven million Americans from falling below the poverty line. It made crucial investments in neglected economic sectors that are likely to pay off for decades. It jump-started the switch to electronic medical records, which will largely end the use of paper records by 2015. It poured more than $1 billion into comparative-effectiveness research on pharmaceuticals. It extended broadband Internet to thousands of rural communities. And it spent $90 billion on a huge variety of wind, solar and other clean energy projects that revived the industry. Republicans, of course, only want to talk about Solyndra, but most of the green investments have been quite successful, and renewable power output has doubled.

Apparently, European regulators plan to file an antitrust complaint against Microsoft for restricting users' choice of Web browsers. The complaint will allege that Microsoft violated a 2009 agreement that required them to offer Windows users a choice of Web browsers in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The complaint could lead to hefty fines.