The FCC will be voting on May 15th to approve new rules which will essentially wreck the fair and neutral internet we all enjoy. We’ve detailed the proposal in another post, but the long and short of it is ISP’s are already allowed to degrade services as they see fit. If these new rules go into effect, ISP’s will be allowed to charge different rates to every online service. Those new added costs will likely be passed on to consumers, or might create a barrier too high for start ups to consider paying, ultimately punishing any service which becomes more popular than a carrier would like.
The announcement has sparked off a pretty visceral reaction from advocacy groups and the tech-ier folks out there. Enough noise has been made for the FCC to request comments be sent to a special email address set up specifically for this discussion: openinternet@fcc.gov.
Now the cynic in me would be afraid that email is essentially the digital equivalent of a “rectangular filing cabinet” (or rubbish bin) to keep all these complaints from filling up the important inboxes. In hedging our bets on messages actually making an impact, at least by sheer quantity, you can also reach out to the individual commissioners on the FCC by going to http://www.fcc.gov/contact-us. There you’ll also find an email for Chairman Tom Wheeler who proposed these new rules.
But maybe that’s not enough.
We’ve seen that as it pertains to regulating the web, the FCC has had limited power to act as the internet isn’t considered a “Common Carrier” infrastructure like phones are.
Redditor OneYearSteakDay has compiled a pretty handy list of Elected Representatives, how much money they’ve received from lobbyists, whether they own investments in telecoms and cable, and it includes their contact information. Including each of them on Net Neutrality communications might not be such a bad idea.
But the buck doesn’t stop there…
During his campaigns in 2008 and 2012, President Obama asserted that Net Neutrality was going to be an important issue for his administration. I’m sure the White House would appreciate being kept apprised of what’s happening, as I’m not entirely sure they’ve noticed. They can be reached here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
It’s easy to get burnt out on these kinds of issues. It wasn’t long ago we were campaigning to stop SOPA, and we’ve been inundated by various political tech stories since then. Net Neutrality isn’t a conservative or a liberal issue. If you enjoy using the internet, wish to see it continue being a place for fair competition, and you don’t want to see rate hikes on individual services you might enjoy, then this is an issue for you.
Comcast alone has a strike team of around 70 lobbyists, all DC insiders, working the House and Senate. Verizon successfully sued the FCC to wreck the Open Internet Order, allowing them to degrade any service or competition they don’t like.
The Supreme Court equates money with speech, which means the carriers have a really loud voice…