Save the Internet

Only You Can Save the Internet

Net Neutrality protection is not well understood by people outside of the tech industry, a fact that FCC chair Ajit Pai is capitalizing on.  Ajit has be so heavily on people not understanding, and not caring, that he has openly bragged that he is a puppet for the telecom industry.  Contrary to what he thinks, Americans are not stupid.  So here is a rundown of what net neutrality protections are.  If you have the time, I highly recommend watching this more in depth explanation by Jon Oliver.

What Net Neutrality Protects You From

Imagine that you want to watch your favorite show streaming on Netflix.  You load it up, and start playing.  The quality is terrible.  It has to stop and buffer every few seconds.  What is going on?  You pay for 50 MBPS down, which is about 25 times faster than it needs to be able to play a 1080p video smoothly.

The answer?  The Net neutrality protections have been gutted, and Netflix didn't pay the multi-million dollar toll that Comcast has demanded from Netflix (this actually happened before).  But wait a second, your service provider isn't Comcast, how can they be slowing your content down?  Well, different sections of internet are owned by various companies.  Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc all use each other's cables to provide you with your internet.  If one of them wants to slow down content from Netflix, everyone suffers.

Tolling the internet doesn't just hurt consumers, it hurts small business as well.  Getting rid of Net Neutrality protections turns the internet into the wild west.  If you want to start a website, telecoms could start charging thousands of dollars for your site to even be useable.  If you don't pay the toll, they could turn down (or even off) the bandwidth going in and out of your website as much as they want.

Now imagine that you are a political party.  Without net neutrality protections, there is nothing preventing political parties from paying providers to completely block content by slowing the bandwidth to certain sites down to 0.  The internet could become a place that is censored by the rich, the elite, and special interest groups.  This is a direct assault on freedom of speech, by saying that you are only granted the privilege of speech if you have enough money or power.

It's Not Too Late

Congress can block the FCC's plan to destroy our democracy, and limit our freedom of speech.  Call your representative, and ask them to block the FCC's assault on the internet.

Visit https://www.battleforthenet.com and join your voice to the thousands of Americans who believe in the freedom of speech.