This Wednesday: Demanding Net Neutrality
Problem:
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:
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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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.
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.
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.
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