(in addition to INTERNET FRIENDSHIPS, and ARTISTS, NEWS, EVERYTHINGGG ELSE THAT IS ESSENTIAL AND WHY WE NEED NET NEUTRALITY)
WE FUCKING RELY ON OUR TECH. OUR *FREE* TECH. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH INTERNATIONAL CALLS ARE?! THAT’S A HELL NO. SO THAT’S WHY WE USE SOCIAL MEDIA!! WE R E L Y ON IT. TO KNOW HOW OUR PARTNER IS DOING. HOW THEIR FAMILY IS DOING. TO KEEP UP OUR RELATIONSHIP. AND FOR MULTIPLE YEARS!!!
If this goes through, I won’t be able to talk to my partner. Actually, make that a WE won’t be able to talk our partners unless you’re rich. Fuck that shit. Call your congresspeople.
And job applications, too. A lot of big employers have web applications only and twitter feeds.
ISPs are slowing/denying service to particular traffic (torrent clients get throttled, Comcast slows Netflix connections unless Netflix pays up, etc)
FCC says that they can’t do that
Appeals courts and lawsuits say FCC acted out of the bounds of current law due to various factors. Most importantly, broadband providers being classified as Title 1 information providers instead of Title 2 common carriers. This justification in the Verizon lawsuit is what struck down 2/3rds of the 2010
FCC Open Internet Order.
FCC ultimately reclassifies ISPs during the Obama administration under Title 2 of the
Communications Act of 1934, as this gives them more secure legal ground to protect/enforce net neutrality than the legal framework they previously relied on (Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996)
FCC stated they’ll apply Title 2 selectively to ISPs, basically only using the parts of the law that are actually relevant to broadband internet
Trump administration rolls around
Ajit Pai, who was previously
Associate General Counsel for Verizon
and voted against the Title 2 reclassification, becomes chairman of the FCC
Basically ISPs were being exploitative, FCC told them they can’t be exploitative, Appeals courts and lawsuits said the FCC technically doesn’t have the legal grounds to say ISPs can’t be exploitative due to their current classification, FCC reclassifies ISPs so they now have the legal grounds to say they can’t be exploitative, and now Ajit wants to roll back the legislation to allow ISPs to be exploitative again on the flimsy unsubstantiated grounds that the legislation somehow stifles competition and market growth.
Reminder to be very polite when writing/calling higher ups about net neutrality. They won’t listen to blind rage, but they WILL listen to a very thorough, patient, and well-meaning person. Yes, this includes Ajit Pai. Even if you think he’s a greedy monster, BE. POLITE. I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH. This goes for everyone but I feel like it’s important to mention him to.
This need more notes
This net neutrality thing sounds nasty as hell and as OP said, whiny and raging letters won’t convince anybody.
The whole net neutrality discussion seems to be focusing on download speeds and access to particular services, but does anybody remember back in 2006 when AOL got caught blocking people from sending or receiving emails that expressed criticism of AOL? There was no sign that it was happening, and the emails would appear to be delivered – AOL’s mail servers would even report a normal “accepted for delivery” status code – but they’d just never show up in the recipient’s inbox. Or how about the incident a year earlier where Telus imposed fake service outages for websites expressing support for the
Telecommunications Workers Union? Again, no indication that any blocking was taking place: just a error page falsely claiming the affected sites were down.
Under the proposed deregulations, this sort of thing would be explicitly permitted, and we know it’s possible because it’s been done. Now consider how much more communication happens via the Internet in 2017 than in 2005/2006. It’s not even email or websites; big chunks of the telephone network now pass through ISP-mediated VOIP channels, and those conversations would likewise be targetable by faked outages.
Like, this isn’t some dystopian sci-fi scenario; we’re talking about horseshit that major ISPs were getting up to on the sly over a decade ago, and are now about to be told can be engaged in without regulatory penalty.
This happened? That’s serious.
By the way, that kind of scenario is how censorship in China works. They don’t throw up a page saying the content is illegal, they just route it in such a way that the packets go around in circles and time out. ISPs could easily start pulling all kinds of tricks to demote things they don’t like – they have the option of not routing it correctly, slowing the bandwidth to a crawl, or just stopping the request and sending back a 404. We need to keep Net Neutrality.
Oh, yeah, it happened. The cited incidents aren’t even the half of it – they’re just a couple of the better known ones.
For example, there was the time that Comcast blocked Boston-area subscribers from accessing their GMail inboxes, and when folks called their support line to complain, they falsely claimed that it was a technical issue on Google’s end and tried to sell them a Comcast email account.
Or the time that Madison River Communications ended up getting fined for their VOIP-metering scheme when it turned out that they were interfering with 911 calls made by users in their service area.
Or the time Verizon started selectively blocking text messages sent by pro-choice advocacy groups, even to recipients who’d explicitly opted into them.
Again, none of this is hypothetical – this isn’t stuff we imagine major telecoms will do in the absence of strong net neutrality protections, but stuff they already have done, and in many cases only stopped due to regulatory pressure at the federal level.
Back in 2015 you demanded that the FCC adopt strict net neutrality rules and establish a free and open internet. And you won.
That should’ve been the end of it. But apparently not.
The new head of the FCC wants to undo the net neutrality protections you fought so hard for.
His proposed changes open the door to your web traffic being slowed down, or even blocked altogether. You could be forced to pay extra to use your favorite apps. You could even be prevented from getting news from the sources you trust.
Title II protects consumers and democracy by ensuring all voices can be heard.
You know the drill. Here’s what to do:
The FCC is taking comments from the public, and dearfcc.org is making it as simple as possible for you to make your voice heard.
You’ll just need to provide a name, an address, and then say a little bit about why rolling back Title II protections is a bad idea. If you’re not quite sure what to write, here’s something to get you started:
I’m writing to urge you to keep our Open Internet rules based on Title II in place. Without them, we could lose the internet as we know it.
The proposed changes to FCC rules would allow fast lanes for sites that pay, and force everyone else into slow lanes. We’ve already seen access to streaming services like Netflix, popular games like League of Legends, and communication platforms like FaceTime slowed down, or even blocked. Conditions like this hurt businesses large and small, and penalize the users who patronize them.
The changes also open the door to unfair taxes on internet users, and could also make it harder for blogs, nonprofits, artists, and others who can’t pay up to have their voices heard.
Please leave the existing net neutrality rules based on Title II in place.
No offense I know most of yall ain’t paying for your internet so I got no idea why you’re afraid of this
This one ain’t too hard to figure out OP.
..other people pay. We’ll be paying eventually. What websites we have access to effects us whether we’re paying or not. What other people have to pay for effects us because it effects whether we have access to it. What. Just what.
Guys, please be careful to vet that what you choose to signal boost is actually accurate. I’m seeing a lot of well-intentioned posts today about Net Neutrality that are likely to do just as much harm as good due to misinformation in them.
For instance, we are not all suddenly shouting that the sky is falling because the FCC has PASSED the bill abolishing Net Neutrality and the changes are to be put in place some time this month. As claimed by one post I just saw with over 5,000 notes already. This is simply, unequivocally NOT true, and it can actually get in the way of the call to action that very post made, asking people to call and email their congressmen, because a lot of people who see that might think “what’s the point, if its already passed?”
It hasn’t. Chairman Ajit Pai of the FCC unveiled in April his proposed plan to strike back the Net Neutrality regulations Obama’s administration passed in 2015, and which have since 2015 been upheld by the courts in the face of Republican opposition’s attempts to claim they overreached. What has people shouting the sky is falling NOW is because yesterday (November 21st) is when the date of the official vote on this proposed plan was announced. That date is December 14th.
Which means there IS still time to affect the outcome of the vote. People are pessimistic about the chances of this vote because the FCC board is held by a Republican majority at the moment, but make the passing of this bill seem toxic enough to other Republican interests and there is still a chance to keep it from passing.
Which is still a hell of a lot better than assuming the bill has already passed and that there’s really no point.
We have until December 14th to kick up enough of a fuss that the Republicans on the FCC board think twice about voting for this bill. And even after that, there are still legal recourses. The courts have refused to uphold other bills Trump’s administration has attempted to pass as overreaching, unconstitutional, and/or in opposition of the true will of the people – just as the Republicans attempted to do back in 2015 when the FCC under Obama passed the Net Neutrality laws in the first place.
This does not mean be complacent. This does not mean assume enough other people will raise enough of a fuss without adding your voice to the mix. It simply means THERE IS STILL TIME TO ACT. The sky may be falling, but until it finishes falling, there’s still a chance to catch it instead.
We have until December 14th to kick up enough of a fuss that the Republicans on the FCC board think twice about voting for this bill.
there IS still time to affect the outcome of the vote.
ifesbob 
