So, Net Neutrality has officially been repealed. It was split 3-2.
Now you guys need to absolutely pummel your local congressional representatives with calls, letters, and protests until Congress steps its game up and fixes this so that the FCC can never do this again.
We watched as three men callously laughed about how silly they thought some of the calls were for not being eloquent enough for their taste. We watched as they lied about the internet, even when the truth was uttered minutes before.
Don’t let them have this win.
Make your representatives miserable until they fix this. The news will be worthless to you in the upcoming months, as every major news network is either owned by an ISP or has tangential business with ISPs. They all serve to profit on this. Fact check with extreme prejudice. Don’t stop until your internet is back to where it needs to be.
Neutral.
I don’t care if you’re far-left, far-right, or dead down the center. Do you want it to be where an ISP can choose to throttle access to Fox News or Breitbart on a whim? What about Vox? What if some bad reviews come out for a movie and Comcast throttles it to hide that? What if Netflix is throttled into oblivion so that Hulu becomes the only possible option for viewing? What if you go to start-up a new business and you’re told that you have to pay for the $500/mo “business package” in order to get higher the 0.3 Mbps traffic speeds to your site?
Nothing about this decision is going to benefit how you use the internet.You use it for paying bills, for doctors and hospitals, for school, for work, and for entertainment.
Ooc: This is in regards to the Net Neutrality repeal. I know
it’s long, but please, please read it. This is something we need to hear.
I understand that the vote on the Net Neutrality repeal is
disheartening. I know it feels hopeless now, we’re all worried the worst could
happen. But here is what you need to understand, what you need to remember: You cannot, cannot, give up. It’s
not yet over.
I came across an article that came out during the
announcement on the repeal vote. The link for it is here. I want to bring to your attention a
particular paragraph:
“The good news is the
internet won’t change overnight, if it all. Blake Reid, a clinical professor at
Colorado Law, says the big broadband providers will wait to see how the
inevitable legal challenges to the new FCC order shakeout. They’ll probably
keep an eye on 2018 and even 2020 elections as well. The courts could shoot
down the FCC’s order, or, given enough public pressure, Congress even could
pass new net neutrality laws.”
This means that this repeal can be overturned by Congress,
and the court cases that are indeed inevitable, especially how Ajit Pai handled
the situation regarding the public comments. The courts could even block this
repeal, just as they have with the bans the administration previously attempted.
It’s going to be a long, rough road for this repeal still, andwe can still fight it.
Stay vigilant, demand to know what your Internet Service
Providers plan to do. You are the customer, you are giving them your money, you deserve to know. Keep putting
pressure on them. If they try to do any of the things warned like bundling,
tiered services; come together and show outrage, don’t let them hear the end of it until they back down. Treat
this like how EA tried to do with Loot boxes.
If Americans are good
at one thing, it’s raising Hell when we get slighted. Trust me, these
corporations will back down when millions of their customers are angrily
threatening their money. We’ve been fighting for our rights before the internet
even began and succeeded, we can still fight and can still prevail yet again. They
cannot take away our rights promised to us by the Constitution, no amount of
money or lies can take that away from us, nor stop us from fighting.
Keep the pressure on your Congress too. Call them, email
them, tell them you want them to do anything and everything in their
legislative power to keep Net Neutrality alive. You cannot give up. You owe it to yourself to keep fighting. We
have what they don’t: numbers. If we come together and push relentlessly, we
will prevail.
FCC voted 3:2 to repeal regulations protecting Net Neutrality. Next steps are in the courts. It’s not “over” by any means, and net neutrality has actually enjoyed some degree of bipartisan support in Congress before. Contact your representatives and let then know where you stand on the issue.
Imagine the phone company throttling your calls or picking which phone calls you can receive?
“Imagine the phone company throttling your calls or picking which phone calls you can receive?“
The fastest internet in the United States is not private. It is operated as a utility. Chattanooga. The city was updating the power grid and the people working on it realized that putting in the infrastructure for high speed internet at the same time would not be that much more expensive. So that’s what they did. And a bunch of ISPs sued the city to try to stop them. Because guess what? Despite all the rhetoric in favor of the “free market”, these companies don’t actually want real competition.
So now Chattanooga has the fastest internet speeds in the entire country. It also has some of the cheapest costs in the entire country because it is run like a utility and owned by the city.
The sad part about this is that those same ISPs that sued are trying to get cities and states to pass laws to make what Chattanooga did essentially illegal.
Question of Smoke 