On Wednesday, nearly 70,000 websites and organizations are planning to take part in a massive online protest to save net neutrality. Participating websites will reportedly display messages on their homepages and encourage users to take action to save the internet as we know it. Supporters of the action include internet giants such as Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Reddit. Supporters of net neutrality say the rules are needed to keep the internet open and prevent corporate service providers from blocking access to websites, slowing down content or providing paid fast lanes for internet service.
But net neutrality has come under attack by the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has outlined his plan to dismantle net neutrality rules, despite polling that shows most Americans support a free and open internet. The FCC has a ready received a record 5.6 million comments on net neutrality.
Evan Greer talking:
this is a moment for everyone, whether you’re an ordinary internet user with a few hundred Instagram fans or a major website with hundreds of thousands of daily visitors, to harness the power of the web to defend this profoundly democratizing technology that’s given more of us a voice than ever before. We need to stop companies like Comcast and Verizon from being able to control what we can see and do online, and protect this platform for freedom of expression and social change.
Michael Copps talking:
first of all, the network is so vital to economic opportunity and innovation, and especially to democracy. I think Evan said it well. This is a tool of unparalleled power that can help us to build democracy. When you look at what has happened to mainstream media—radio, television and cable—how it has been corporatized and commercialized and consolidated, how much journalism we have lost, you really get down to the essential question: Is media providing the news and information that citizens need in order to make intelligent decisions for the future? There’s a lot of evidence that that’s really not happening right now.
Net neutrality, however, is a free speech issue. And at its center is the ability of Americans to go where they want on the internet, to access the content that they want and to be treated like everybody else is treated, so you don’t have Comcast and AT&T and Verizon acting as gatekeepers and having the power to slow down sites that they don’t like or to block or to throttle, or to give fast lanes to a few while the rest of us struggle along on slow lanes. To be a fully participating citizen in 21st century America, you have to have access to high-speed, affordable broadband. And that’s what’s at issue now.
This issue has been to the federal courts three times now in the last 10 years. And three times the court has said, if you want to protect net neutrality, the only enforceable way to do it is through the rules that were passed in 2015 by the Tom Wheeler-led Federal Communications Commission. There’s no other way to do it. So, for Chairman Pai to come now and say, “Well, I’m going to figure out some other way to do this that’s not Title II,” just means that he’s trying to get rid of net neutrality, just like they’re trying to get rid of privacy, just like they’re trying to get rid of subsidized broadband for the poor in America. It’s really—it’s really full speed in reverse.
worst FCC commission
we’ve been building for the last five or six years and doing good things on communications, on E-rate, the program for schools and libraries, to expand that, to expand Lifeline so all Americans could enjoy it, no matter what their economic status, to spread broadband around the country in hard-to-reach inner cities and rural America, and now we’re doing away with all of that.
And there’s no question in my mind that a communications so important as broadband has to have some public interest oversight. It has to be used for the benefit of the people, and it cannot be turned over wholesale to a few ISPs. You know, for a long time, people in the early stages of the internet thought, “Well, you don’t have to worry about the internet, because it’s so open, it’s so dynamic, it’s immune from the laws of consolidation and all this stuff. Power is at the edges.” And it didn’t take too many years for us to figure out that that’s not the direction it was going. It was going down the same road as radio and television and cable. And we cannot let that happen to this most powerful tool, technology tool, in all of history to help us expand democracy, to build a society where democracy is paved with those broadband bricks mentioned at the outset of the show.
– this issue that Ajit Pai raises that infrastructure investment by the private sector has declined rapidly since the Title II net neutrality laws were put into effect.
That’s just absolutely nonsensical. I don’t know where Ajit got his facts from, but not too many weeks ago I heard Michael Powell, former chairman of the FCC, who now runs the cable association, talk about how phenomenal the investment was in the internet. And open up your papers every day, and you see these companies paying billions and billions of dollars for one another. And the bazaar has really opened at the FCC now, because everybody knows this FCC is going to approve more and more mergers, more and more acquisitions and transactions, leading to further commercialization and consolidation. So, it’s a huge threat. And most of the studies are telling us that investment is more than holding its own. I mean, this is one of the most dynamic sectors in the economy. So, I think that’s a case of fearmongering tied to ideology and tied to the special interests.
https://www.battleforthenet.com/
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Evan Greer
campaign director of Fight for the Future. She is helping organize Wednesday’s Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.
Michael Copps
former FCC commissioner from 2001 until 2012. He’s currently special adviser on media and democracy reform at Common Cause.
— source democracynow.org