The FCC decided to go ahead with the vote to remove the Net Neutrality rules that the Obama administration set up.
As you can see, this is what the major ISPs wants to do if they have their way. This can do a few things:
Stiff new innovations, making it harder for smaller companies to compete.
Silence independent voices.
Potentially putting up a “walled garden” on a wide scale.
Make distribution of information harder for low-income people.
Imagine this website, if you will, only working on Verizon networks while AT&T customers are charged a little extra, or have slower access to the same information.
Remember, your ISP owns content providers and may give top-shelf, VIP treatment to their own things while stiffing everyone else. We need to address this.
Now, some of you may recall earlier this year that John Oliver and a lot of other people, companies (and yours truly) did a rallying cry to tell the FCC to back off the Net Neutrality rules, which resulted in millions of comments on their proposal.
However, there’s been a few problems… in short, it seems that the FCC chose to not listen due to “inconsistancies”.
Sidenote: Tumblr isn’t the best place to talk “long-form” so if you’re interested in looking at these notes, here are some places to go to.
https://medium.com/@AGSchneiderman/an-open-letter-to-the-fcc-b867a763850a – “ Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’ and other Americans’ identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.”
4) Write a letter to your representative. Not an email, an actual, snail mail letter.
Let’s all band together and do something about this. Our future of sharing information, building innovation, nurturing voices and creativity depends on your actions now!
I know it may sound hopeless. Look at when they announced this (you probably didn’t know they announced this on Monday when you’re busy getting ready to for the holiday!). But if we say it with one voice to BACK OFF THE NET, we maybe able to make a difference.
Hi.
I’m the Original Poster and I did my best to keep this brief with sources you can see for yourself.
However, with misinformation being a thing, I decided to amend to this to give you some extra pointers as to why I was specific about these steps and not recommend things like strictly writing to the FCC.
1) Calling your reps and writing them is more effective than doing it via email. It’s been stated over, and over, and over again. Sadly, letters and phone calls are more effective.
2) Signing a petition can help, but without a way to verify you, it can be just as useful as shouting on Twitter (and will they look at Twitter? Nope.) It’s not totally useless, but it will not totally do the job.
See, if the FCC can use “bots” as an excuse (look at the sources in the original post), what makes you think a senator and representatives won’t? This is why “calling your rep” is the first action step and “writing your reps” is the last.
3) Regardless, the non-profit organizations’ job (the one I posted about) is to spread awareness BEYOND YOUR NETWORK. Think of them as a private army you’re recruiting for this one mission. You can only tell so many people and some of you don’t live in the United States, which makes it even harder!
4) BTW, you’re not just talking about this on Tumblr, are you? You have to talk to people on your other social networks as well. They are affected by things as well. Don’t want to talk? Post a link to here and let me do the talking for you.
5) While I have done the research for you, please do your own in conjunction with this. That way, you can be better informed, especially when talking about this to other people.
6) Oh and one more thing since I did neglect this in my last post. I forgot to post the “deadline” – the actual day they will vote. Well…
We have until December 14, 2017!
So, let’s mobilize! Organize! Transform and roll out!
Okay, maybe not the last one…
But make the calls to your reps! Scroll up and do your part, no matter which side you’re on!
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.
A whole bunch of senators have signed and sent a letter to Ajit Pai, demanding him to once again delay the FCC’s vote on a net neutrality repeal until he comes clean about his sh*t. The letter even called
out
the FCC on their use of bots to unfairly tip the balance in favor of the repeal.
Your voices are starting to pay off, but the battle is far from over. If you haven’t done your part yet, please contact your senator or local representative and let them know how much you DON’T WANT net neutrality to be repealed.
Don’t stay silent! Positive change doesn’t come from apathy or inaction. If you keep this up and then some for as long as necessary, you guys could win this battle and stop this looming threat on an open internet.
“A free and open Internet is vital to ensuring a level playing field online, and we believe that your proposed action may be based on an incomplete understanding of the public record in this proceeding,” the senators wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “In fact, there is good reason to believe that the record may be replete with fake or fraudulent comments, suggesting that your proposal is fundamentally flawed.”
this is your reminder that tumblr’s parent company, verizon (an active enemy of net neutrality) has been forcibly censoring net neutrality coverage on the site. posts have been deleted, people have been automatically unfollowed from the tag, and no matter how much anyone posts about it, they have blocked net neutrality from reaching the trending tags.
let me stress how important this is.
this is active media censorship.
and if net neutrality dies, you can expect to see a lot more of that in the future. (if you can still afford social media…)
i fully expect this post to be deleted. screenshot it. repost it. make an uproar! we cant let this happen!
keep spreading this message until the servers cant keep up anymore. keep going; never be silenced. tell everyone you know who enjoys the internet. spread this to facebook, twitter, instagram, anywhere. everyone deserves a free and neutral internet.
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma
ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).
This blog did not and will not send requests for bitcoin donations.
There seems to be a virus or some sort of malware going around causing blogs to “send out” chat messages to blogs that they follow asking for help with the purchase of certain items through donations of seemingly small amounts using bitcoin and adds a link to the message.
The message goes as following (at least the first message I got went like this): “Hi there buddy. I need help, I’m trying to buy a laptop and I can’t afford it. I’m about 0.36$ short, and I’d really appreciate if you could help me and transfer some money to me via bitcoin using this *link*.”
The small details in the message seems to have a few variations with the greeting, amount and purchased item showing up in different variations from formal to friendly, from 0.016 to 2$ and from a phone case to a laptop among others.
The blogs that are affected send out the messages to blogs that they follow for a long time mostly, so you are most likely to receive the message from a long time, active follower whose name you might recognize or a mutual etc. The blogs that are affected are not spam bots but actual active followers who follow the recipient for months or years and most likely the blogger who “sent” the message is unaware of the message being sent.
DO NOT OPEN THE LINK.
Opening up the link will cause the virus to spread even more and infect your computer/mobile with any sort of malware.
If you have received a message of that sort from this blog please know that it was not sent by me or within my control and ignore/delete the message without clicking the link.
I just got this thing on another blog FIVE MINUTES AGO,
I’ve had 100 of these this morning. I’m afraid I’ll be closing my IMs to mutuals for a while because I already can’t handle the amount of mail I get without this. Please check your IMs, change your passwords, turn on two-factor-authentication (I know it seems like a pain in the ass but if it’s an option, always do it) and run your antivirus and anti malware.
Malwarebytes is a good, free (with paid upgrade available) anitmalware software for Windows, and is now available for Mac and Android as well, just in case you need a recommendation. The version on my phone has been screaming at me all morning every time I try to open tumblr. Something ain’t right fam, protect yourselves and your friends.
andtheytoldustotellyouhello 