If you don’t have time/patience to read up, skip to the bottom for direct details on how to help.
The majority of American people don’t realize the impact of killing Net Neutrality. It is not, in any way, compatible with a free society. This is an Orwellian nightmare becoming reality, an authoritarian dream to consolidate information into the hands of a few controlled by a few.
If the new definition of terrorism as a threat to our freedom holds true, this FCC decision is the biggest terror attack of all time.
The idea of forcing financially struggling families and students to choose between “social media/entertainment packs” & “news/educational packs” is cruel, Orwellian at best. This backwards country has made healthcare a question of income, and is about to do the same with information.
This suddenly imbalanced playing field presents an enormous advantage for established companies, but it entirely freezes out startups trying to gain visibility. This, naturally, stifles innovation. If Net Neutrality dies, Americans will be left with no way to get information the corporate interests don’t want us to have. Do you like Billboard for your music news, consisting of corporate announcements, frivolous fraud industry props like Machine Gun Kelly, and celebrity obsession?
Workers, poor people, sick people… anyone outside the interests of the clear and present oligarchy will be silenced. It will destroy the ability of grassroots groups to organize effectively.
Net Neutrality means corporations can’t pay to manipulate how you use the internet. If this goes away, not only will all your data be scrutinized by telecom companies, they can decide how fast your internet works on certain websites. Good luck on that porn.
If FCC dismantles it, and you get internet from Verizon, they may force you to use Yahoo as your search engine (because they own it), but pay to use Google.
Not even the orange treasongoblin is immune:
Even worse, the process of making our voices heard has been compromised. A massive scheme has been uncovered to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’ and other Americans’ identities. This numbers in the tens of thousands.
New York State Attorney General has written an open letter to the FCC on this unprecedented infiltration.
“In doing so, the perpetrator or perpetrators attacked what is supposed to be an open public process,” the letter reads, “by attempting to drown out and negate the views of the real people, businesses, and others who honestly commented on this important issue. Worse, while some of these fake comments used made up names and addresses, many misused the real names and addresses of actual people as part of the effort to undermine the integrity of the comment process. That’s akin to identity theft, and it happened on a massive scale.”
Portugal is a prime example of what the internet could look like if the FCC eliminated Net Neutrality rules. Under their arrangement, without net neutrality, “big-name apps could theoretically even pay telecoms firms for preferential access, offering them money — and smaller companies just couldn’t compete with that. (It’s not clear whether any of the companies named above have paid for preferential access.) An ISP could even refuse to grant access to an app at all unless they paid up.”
Net Neutrality is critical to ensuring the internet remains a place where people can come together and make their voices heard. Collaborate. Meanwhile, industry-funded Net Neutrality opponents in Congress have done everything they can to dismantle or undermine the rules. Legislators have introduced numerous deceptive bills and attached damaging riders to must-pass government-funding bills.
We have to fight back.
Here are 2 petitions to sign, one international and one exclusively U.S.
Text “resist” to 504-09. It’s a bot that will send a formal email, fax, and letter to your representatives. It also finds your representatives for you. All you have to do is text it, and they will guide you from there.
Battle For The Net will connect you to your reps/senators so that you can tell them that you do not support it; it does all the heavy researching for you.
This affects us all. DO. YOUR. PART.
If you don’t care, neither will the next guy.
This is a White House Petition for Net Neutrality. They need 100,000 signatures.
While you’re at it, don’t forget the 265 members of Congress who sold you out to ISPs, and how much it cost to buy them.
