Right now, we have a free and open Internet. Sure, it can cost you a pretty penny to access the Web, but it’s an open sourced environment in many, many ways, and no one website is inherently faster than another. Sure some load faster because of the demands of Flash, or HTML5, or videos, but that’s about it.

However, there’s a major push being made by the country’s biggest and ugliest cable and telephone companies – Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT & T – you know, the ones that we have to fork it over to in order to find our favorite recipes, poems, news, social networking sites, chat, email…. (Wait… you’re on the Internet right now, so I can probably stop listing everything that’s on the Internet. That is, unless, you’re my 89-year-old grandmother—who makes a mean meatloaf—and I’ve finally convinced you to hop on the WWW with promises of my verbal acumen. Hi, Nonna! )  Anyway, they want to be “gatekeepers,” deciding which sites go fast, slow, or not at all. Read that last clause again: not at all. That’s the kind of control they literally want to have. Why? To stifle competition. To sell speedier connections to the highest bidders. To control content.  The result? An end to the most significant information revolution that has ever happened.

Anyway, Net Neutrality is the issue this week. What is it, exactly? Net Neutrality essentially means that WWW service providers cannot discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online. In other words, all websites and Internet tech all will continue to exist on a level playing field.

Net Neutrality drives technological innovation, free speech, economic growth, and a democratic sharing of information. Net Neutrality prevents service providers from interfering with our Internet experiences.  In the words of The Free Press Action Fund, “With Net Neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data — not to choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.”

Where do we come in? We need to fight back against the aforementioned behemoths that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the FCC and Congress. And because there are many more of us than there are of them, and because we hold the power of our votes, and because tens of thousands of small and large businesses want Net Neutrality, too, we have a real chance to retain a freedom we’ve come to expect. And that’s a key thing about America: we can’t ever assume we’ll retain a freedom just because it exists now.

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Make Progress:

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Sign:

This doesn’t get much easier people.

Click the logo to the right. Sign your name to a petition put together by the aforementioned Free Press Action Fund. Join over 1.9 million Americans who are openly speaking to Congress, insisting that they act according to the freedoms we deserve.

Net Neutrality is the most important First Amendment issue facing this country.

It follows that staying silent on Net Neutrality is a demonstration that you don’t care about the freedom that you’d be choosing not to exercise. Wait. That sentence is a little confusing. Just sign the sucker, okay? You’ll thank us in ten years.

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Donate:

Five bucks. Half of a trip to see a lousy movie starring Ashton Kutcher (I realize this is redundant). A super-sized sack of crap from a fast-food “restaurant.” Hell, you can re-wear some socks and underwear and go another week without doing laundry.

The point is that you might not think that five bucks is much, but when enough people care enough to give five bucks, you’d be amazed at how quickly it adds up. Let’s go back to the movies for a second: a trip to a flick will set you back about ten bucks; just think of the insane totals that movies rake in every weekend. Those small amounts of money, collected together, make the news every single Monday!

Worried the Free Press Action Fund won’t use your money wisely? Worry not, my progressive grasshopper. 87 cents of every dollar donated supports their core campaign and movement building work to make the U.S. media system more democratic, diverse, and accountable.

Just click this sentence to help keep your voice in the ears of those who control what happens next.

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Watch:

Okay, so this video is a little dated (but barely), and yes, sure, it’s even a little goofy (I mean, there are cartoon alien spacecraft zapping the Internet with lasers), but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t explain what I’ve tried to explain in ways that cannot be misunderstood. So if you’re at all confused, please, please, please watch this video. (If nothing else, my favorite REM song off my favorite REM album makes a guest appearance.)

Net Neutrality is about power and who will have it: us or them. And yes, this is an either-or situation.

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Share:

Right now, as the Internet exists, consumers –you and me—have the control. We choose content, applications, and services available anywhere, regardless of who we use to log on. If we lose Net Neutrality, we’ll be faced with an Internet that lacks the freedoms we’ve come to expect, and it will look much more like cable TV. Websites, content, applications will be like channels, and we’ll be forced to pay to choose what we want to see (if we can see what we want at all, that is).

Right now, the Internet is a place of freedom, and it bucks the tradition of previous forms of media in that any site (including Progressive Wednesday) has the possibility of having the popularity, scope, and reach of a TV station. We value freedom of expression so much that it appears at the beginning of our list of rights. Rights we lacked and we can lack again. This isn’t a scare tactic on our part. This is the reality we face from big businesses right now, today, and tomorrow, until they give up or get their ugly way.

So this action is the simplest of all. See that “Share” button on the left-hand side of this post? It’s about an inch and change below this sentence. Click it and share this Wednesday with your friends. You can send it along on your social network of choice through that button or you can even email it.

The choices we make now, the actions we chose to take, will determine if Net Neutrality continues to exist or if decisions about content are decided in boardrooms. I think you know which one is more progressive.

I’m willing to wager, dollars to DiCamillo donuts, that you already know about most of the free webmail services out in Internet-land: AOL, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc., etc., etc. So here’s another freebie: Community Mail Center. Here’s what makes this sucker different: the technology used to maintain this email account is powered exclusively by renewable energy.

The gray matter behind this new tool belongs to Think Host, a web-hosting provider powered, you guessed it, by wind and solar power. And why are they offering up free email? I’ll let their digital words do the talkin’:

Because we are very cool people, whom, like you, aren’t real happy with the current state of the world. Instead of just complaining about our woes and drowning our sorrows in wheatgrass juice, we try and instigate positive change with projects like Community Mail — it’s one of the few free earth-friendly email services around.

So for a whole mess of nothing but clicking your mouse, you get an environmentally friendly email account run by a progressive, privately-owned company. You get 100MB of storage. You get to choose from four different domains. And this sucker has all the perks of the aforementioned big four companies: an address book, a spell checker, spam filters, external POP3 accounts, and a message search engine, amongst a whole bunch o’ other stuff.

If you’re like us, you like to know more about something on the web (it’s world wide, don’t forget) before you sign on the binary line, so here’s the 411 and FAQ about Community Mail. Even if you don’t sign up for an account, don’t forget that knowledge of progressivism is, in itself, a kind of progressivism.

The first years of my memory are of Niagara Falls. We lived on Orchard Parkway in a tiny second-floor house apartment. And as I grew up in the surrounding area, I learned to think of my hometown as the honeymoon and suicide capital of the world.

I grew up with daredevils risking life, limb, and the lives and limbs of their rescuers, by plummeting in various contraptions over the Horseshoe Falls. I saw news reports of poor fools who fell and drown to their deaths on kayaks and jet-skis as they tried to conquer the cataracts. I watched national television coverage of the lawsuits connected to Love Canal, a neighborhood that was the site of one of the worst toxic-waste-dumping scandals in American history.

My first job, as a bakery assistant, was in Niagara Falls at the headquarters of Di Camillo Bakery, a family business still thriving in this city. And I watched as department stores and jewelry stores and restaurants evaporated from Main Street, turning the road into an assortment of seedy bars, adult novelty stores, and boarded up buildings, each empty as the pockets of the homeless wandering the city. And I watched as the factories closed their doors, and added good, hard-working souls to the unemployment lines– ¦.

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Make Progress:

But I also grew up next to a place where people teem to see one the natural wonders of the world. And I grew up in an area where my relatives worked the bluest-collar of jobs, but managed to put lasagna on the table (we're good Italian-Americans, after all). And I grew up where my grandfather landed after traveling the Atlantic to move to America, the same city where my father was raised and remained, the same city where my sister got married. And I grew up next to one of the marvels of electrical science, the Niagara Power Project.

And so I believe in this place. And I love this place. And it's time we all helped this treasure of not just New York, but of America, and not just of America, but of the world. We're ready, if you are, to make progress in Niagara Falls.

• Buy
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Editor’s Note: Below you’ll find photos of some of our favorite locations in the city of Niagara Falls.

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The Little Italy neighborhood and business district.

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The genius that is the Niagara Power Project. To learn more about it, click here.

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Di Camillo Bakery, where they make the best Italian bread you’ll ever eat.

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The Niagara River in autumn (if it wasn’t obvious from, you know, the leaves).

We hemmed and hawed. We confabbed and powwowed amongst our entire staff. There were moments of hullabaloo and others of brouhaha. And we think we've got the best minute-for-minute way that folks can help boost tourism to Niagara Falls (excluding, of course, cajoling your best buds and extended family to hop a flight or maybe take a road trip our way). Below you'll find a letter to the editor that we encourage you to alter depending on your facts, feelings and location[1], then copy, paste, and mass-email the sucker to the following travel magazines:

• National Geographic Magazine: ngsforum@nationalgeographic.com
• National Geographic Traveler Magazine: traveler@nationalgeographic.com
• National Geographic Adventure Magazine: adventure@ngs.org
• Road & Travel Magazine: editor@roadandtravel.com
• World Hum: tips@worldhum.com
• Love Tripper: editors@lovetripper.com
• Travel-Travel-Travel: editor@travel-travel-travel.com
• CNN Traveler: dan.hayes@ink-publishing.com
• Vacations Magazine: contact@VacationsMagazine.com
• Family Fun Magazine: letters.familyfun@disney.com

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Dear Editor:

I recently visited Niagara Falls, New York, and I left stunned by the beauty on display on the American side of this natural wonder of the world. While the Canadian side boasted kitschy pseudo-museums, trinket stores, and family unfriendly gentlemen's clubs, the American side focuses on the gorgeous environment through the state parks, a helicopter ride, Terrapin Point, the Flight of Angels balloon ride, Cave of the Winds, Maid of the Mist, Niagara Falls Observation Tower, and Prospect Point. On the American side, I was able to stand just feet away from all three of the cataracts that together make Niagara Falls. I also hiked down to Devil's Hole State Park to watch the Class 5 rapids stampeding through the gorge, a breathtaking site in and of itself.

I'm asking that you write an article about this location, encouraging your readers to make a trip to the side of the Falls most suited for families, honeymooners, eco-tourists, and anyone who’s never stood right next to the mighty Niagara.

Sincerely,

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Instead of entering all the addresses into the email as you normally would do, we recommend placing one address in the address bar, and adding the rest as BCC, also known as “blind carbon copy.” You might also send a variation of the letter to your newspaper of choice (you can find a complete listing of newspapers by clicking here). But if you could do us a favor: please don’t send these letters to the good folks at the Niagara Gazette, Lockport Union-Sun & Journal, Tonawanda News, The Journal-Register, The Grand Island Record, or The Buffalo News. We're pretty sure they know about the grandeur of the Falls. Thanks.

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Editor’s Note: You can contact Travel and Leisure by clicking this sentence.

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[1] If this is going to work, we really need folks to personalize the letter, if only a smidgen (and yes, we just wrote the word “smidgen– ). Obviously, if you live in the Niagara area, then you can center the letter around that fact.

Really, that should read “Problems.–

You need email. You might like being able to access you email from remote locations. So, there's a good chance you have one of the many free webmail services out there. These services can also be checked from your mobile phone, and most provide excellent spam and junk mail blocking. They each have varying degrees of virus protection (You can read about a whole mess ‘o them here and here.)

But each have some issues:

• Yahoo! Mail: They display flash-based ads when you're reading and composing email. They also add ads at the bottom of the emails you send.
  
• Google’s Gmail: They show text ads next to your emails, and there are some concerns about the privacy of the emails and the account as a whole. Read about those concerns here and here and here.
• Microsoft’s Hotmail: They also let you gawk at flash ads, links to articles on the MSNBC webpage (which would then let you gawk at more flash ads), and the bottom of emails you send include ads for Microsoft's search engine (which couldn't mimic Google's spare presentation more without actually being Google.com).
• AOL: Besides the requisite flash ads, AOL's free mail is pop-up: when you try to write a new message, a new window opens for you to write your email. (You get to choose your font.) The bottom of the emails you send with AOL also include ads, in our tests these ads were links for AOL services,

Regardless, you’re having to see more advertising than you might want to while reading or composing email, and you might not want to send ads for free. The storage size is fantastic (almost ridiculous in the case of Google's 2.8 gigs and Yahoo's 1 gig), and most of the search features rock as well. We’ve used the major web-mail providers in the past. We still do on occasion (we ain't perfect, okay?).

These email addresses function as advertising for the company offering the email. If you have a business and use these services, you don’t really have a unique email address. Or if you’re a job seeker, it might be sweet to have a sweeter email address. So the upshot is this: there might be a better fit for you, and a progressive one at that.

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Make Progress:

We recommend, if you’re looking to free yourself from the aforementioned providers, that you consider purchasing an email address through a domain name registrar like GoDaddy.com. Their email accounts have virus protection, spam blocking, cell phone text-mail, and webmail. You can also set up your account with Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, or, if you want to be even more progressive, you could use Thunderbird (which replaces Outlook) or Sea Monkey (which can be used to replace Mail). To acquire this kind of email, you essentially purchase a domain name. (If you really want to, you can have your new mail forwarded to a free webmail address.) What are the other pro’s to this? you ask. Here goes:

• If you have a small business, even if you don’t want a webpage, this purchase allows you to have control over your business's possible domain name, and allows for your employees to have unique email addresses that advertise your company as opposed to someone else’s (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and so on and yada yada and etc.).
• If you’re an individual, this purchase might also be helpful: you can protect the domain names that contain your name. You will also have a more memorable email address that might help you stand out on resumes and in job applications.
• If you’re a parent, each member of your family could have an personalized email account, like Pebbles@TheFlintstones.com, and as a parent you can have more control over your children's experience on the web, which, if you haven’t heard, is world wide!
• Again, if you don't want to set up a “regular– webpage, you can use the domain name for other purposes. You could bounce folks from your domain name to the blog you write. You could, however, use this as an excuse to get cracking on designing a basic page with a resume, and the like. If you’re at all tech savvy, this seems like a must, so what are you waiting for?

Please note that this ain’t no advertisement for Go Daddy. (They’re not giving us any money for this, though, you know, if they want to the only thing stopping them is them.) They’re just one of oodles of privately held companies you could go with. We recommend using a private company for both the domain and server, you know, because we’re private kinds of guys.

If you do this, we highly (and not the stoned kind of highly, the sober kind) recommend “privatizing” the purchase. Otherwise your name, address and email address appear when someone does a WhoIs search on your domain name.

If you’ve got other ideas or questions about better emailing, just leave us a comment or shoot us a line, and by line, we mean “email.”

Gmail image courtesy of this kind dude.