T-Mobile boss John Legere apologizes for f-bombing nonprofit

T-Mobile (TMUS) CEO John Legere has created a popular persona for himself -- with 2 million Twitter followers -- as a fast talking, occasionally obnoxious public speaker who tells it like he sees it.

And that persona, along with a bunch of savvy, pro-consumer offerings, has helped build T-Mobile into the fastest-growing U.S. mobile company. Legere's company added more than 8 million customers in each of the past two years, while surpassing Sprint (S) to become the third-ranked carrier in the country. And the CEO rightfully gets much credit for T-Mobile's 45% stock gain last year, even as shares of his main competitors Verizon Wireless (VZ) and AT&T (T) returned 4% and 8%, respectively.

But sometimes Legere can go overboard and actually get in the way of T-Mobile's consumer appeal -- which is exactly what happened last week.

The CEO took to Twitter to defend T-Mobile's new Binge On service, which lets customers watch many streaming video services including HBO, Hulu and Netflix (NFLX) without using up their data allowances, albeit at a reduced picture resolution (down from high-definition television to a level comparable to a DVD). The reduction reduces the load on T-Mobile's network by about two-thirds.

T-Mobile says most people can't tell the difference between those resolutions on a phone's small screen and customers can choose to turn the free service and its automatic video squeeze on or off at any time. But by default the service is turned on for all customers and some critics argue that T-Mobile is violating federal net neutrality rules that bar Internet service providers from degrading the quality of any online offering.

In firing back at some of those arguments on Twitter, Legere took aim at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been among the critics. "Who the f--- are you anyway, EFF?” Legere said in a live video he broadcast on Twitter. “Why are you stirring up so much trouble?”

Turns out the EFF has been fighting for consumer rights on the Internet and elsewhere for decades, particularly relating to privacy and surveillance, encryption and freedom of information. Created in 1990 by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, Lotus Software founder Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems, the group has strong backing in Silicon Valley and among prominent techies around the country.

Legere's f-word broadside at the group prompted more criticism and only stirred up more debate about the possible net neutrality problem with Binge On. One of the smallest online video service participants even dropped out of the T-Mobile program to protest the attack on EFF.

So on Monday night, the CEO offered an apology to the EFF on his blog, along with yet another detailed description and defense of Binge On.

"I don’t filter myself and you know that no one at T-Mobile filters me either (no, they don’t even try). That means I will sometimes incite a bit of a ‘social media riot,’ but I’m not going to apologize for that," Legere wrote. "I will however apologize for offending EFF and its supporters. Just because we don’t completely agree on all aspects of Binge On doesn’t mean I don’t see how they fight for consumers. We both agree that it is important to protect consumers' rights and to give consumers value."

Legere said T-Mobile will talk further with the EFF, but the advocacy group hasn't backed down from its criticism of the automatic video cutbacks. "We are grateful for the apology and appreciate Mr. Legere recognizing our work in fighting for the consumers," EFF said in a statement on Tuesday. "We too hope to have a discussion with T-Mobile regarding net neutrality and Binge On."

But the quick apology could turn the focus away from Legere's misstep and back to the merits of Binge On, which seems pretty appealing, at least from a mobile consumer point of view.