Without quite saying so, President Barack Obama made it pretty clear during a Google Hangouts chat on Friday that he’d like to see the FCC respond forcefully to the overturning of its net neutrality rules by a federal appeals court:

The new commissioner of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, who I appointed, I know is a strong supporter of net neutrality. We live under a system in which when a court rules we have to respect that ruling initially, but the FCC is looking at all the options at their disposal, potential appeals, potential rulemaking, a variety of tools that they may have in order to continue to vindicate the notion of a free and open Internet, and I think you can feel confident that this administration will continue to support that. There are going to be a lot of technical issues about how best we can get to that. And I know that they’re still evaluating the court opinion.

The one good piece of news coming out of this court opinion was that the court did confirm that the FCC can regulate this space. They have authority, and the question now is how do they use that authority, if the old systems and rulings that they had in place were not effective in preserving net neutrality do they have other tools that would stand up to court scrutiny that accomplish the same goals?

You can expect that even though the FCC is independent — once I make the appointment I can’t meddle in the decision making there — based on my conversations with Tom Wheeler before he was appointed I’m pretty confident, and they’ve said already that they’re going to be exploring how they can continue to uphold what makes the Internet so special.

Translation: I have Chairman Wheeler’s back, but I gave him that job for a reason, and I’d really like to see him deliver.

Obama is not the only one amping up the net neutrality rhetoric lately. The head of global government relations for Netflix, Christopher Libertelli, had some pretty pointed comments in a piece by Nick Bilton at the New York Times’ Bits Blog yesterday on the subject of paying for internet fast lanes.

“There’s a long history of the telcos saying, ‘We’ll be good people, we’ll act like the rules are in place,’ and then six to nine months later they are breaking those rules,” Libertelli said. He added that Netflix was already seeing instances of its service slowing in certain areas but the company could not do much about it.

He’s basically calling the telcos a bunch of liars, which is a lot more combative than the carefully measured comments Reed Hastings offered the net neutrality ruling in Netflix’s fourth-quarter shareholder letter and earnings call.

Whether such sharpened rhetoric will spur the FCC to action is still unclear, of course. What is clear is that the fight over network management practices and their impact on consumers and content providers is far from over.