Save Net Neutrality, For Freedom and The Memes

The fight for net neutrality was lost on December 14 of last year. However, almost half a year later, nothing major has happened yet – despite FCC chairman Ajit Pai officially beginning to roll back 2015’s Title II Net Neutrality order after the FCC commission decided that an equal and fair internet just wasn’t what they wanted.

In its simplest form, net neutrality is the access to a free and regulated internet where an individual’s pipeline to the internet can’t arbitrarily pick favorites on how fast said content is received. For example, if Netflix were to have a show that directly competed with one of Comcast’s shows, Comcast could not slow down the speed at which the consumers stream Netflix’s show…or at least they couldn’t until now.

The road from having a fair and regulated internet to having it be in danger for the foreseeable future started with sitting president Donald Trump naming Ajit Pai as FCC chairman early on in his presidency.

 Pai, a former Associate General Counsel at Verizon, from the get-go had promised to repeal net neutrality and after a lot of fighting from almost everyone not involved with big telecom companies, the FCC killed net neutrality in a controversial three-to-two vote.

Following the vote, the next steps were to go through the federal register. Due to effects this would have on tech industries and how they report info to the government, it had to go through the Office of Management and Budget. After that it was weirdly inactive with original estimates, placing the day net neutrality officially died around April.

On May 10, The FCC released a statement that as of June 11 net neutrality will officially be dead – meaning that ISPs like Verizon or Comcast could slow down content you want unless you pay more for that content to be provided at the same speed.

“Restoring Internet Freedom” is what the FCC calls this despite it being quite literally the opposite for the general public. The FCC killing net neutrality actively hurts everyone except for the telecom companies that have lobbied so heavily for this for years.  

Many accusations have been thrown around regarding how and why this even came to be considering this was considered a non issue.

One of the prevailing accusations is that everyone from congress members to FCC commissioners were essentially bought out by telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast via lobbying. For months, years in some cases, telecom companies lobbied with members of congress for looser regulations being suggested, with $101 million being received among all 535 members of congress.

Along with the congress members potentially being biased to favor companies that donate thousands of dollars to them, it is believed that certain members of the FCC were also biased due to their previous relationships with major telecom companies.

Whatever the reason, internet is currently still neutral. However, on June 11, that will change and once that does, the internet’s landscape could be very different for the foreseeable future.

A multitude of websites including Reddit, Tumblr and other websites have “red alerts” out advising people to contact their representatives in a last ditch effort to save the internet. Congress still has to vote on the changes being allowed or not, and although it appears bleak, there is still hope to stop ISPs from potentially affecting who and what we watch.