Net Neutrality Pop-up

[Mick West]

Along with many other sites on the internet, I've added a on-day, and on-time only pop-up in support of Net Neutrality.

If you click the X it will go away, and never return. But I encourage people, if they are not familiar with Net Neutrality, to follow the link, and read about the issue.

While I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that today's campaign is organized by corporate "Big Content" (Netflix, Google, etc), I feel that net neutrality is important from the perspective of freedom of speech. Not having explicit common carrier laws for the internet raises the possibility of ISPs removing or limiting access to sites they dislike for whatever reason.

I know many readers and poster here are strong believers in free markets, and against government intervention, but here people have very little choice in their ISPs, and any market correction, if it happened at all, would take too long to account for any harm done.

That said, I'm not really doom-and-gloom about the whole thing, it's just an issue I feel deserves attention.

More info, and the arguments for and against are listed on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

 

[Mick West]

I've replaced the pop-up with a 1-day dismissible site notice, as some people reported problems with the pop-up. Sorry about that.

 

[Jason]

Along with many other sites on the internet, I've added a on-day, and on-time only pop-up in support of Net Neutrality.

If you click the X it will go away, and never return. But I encourage people, if they are not familiar with Net Neutrality, to follow the link, and read about the issue.

While I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that today's campaign is organized by corporate "Big Content" (Netflix, Google, etc), I feel that net neutrality is important from the perspective of freedom of speech. Not having explicit common carrier laws for the internet raises the possibility of ISPs removing or limiting access to sites they dislike for whatever reason.

I know many reader and poster here are strong believers in free markets, and against government intervention, but here people have very little choice in their ISPs, and any market correction, if it happened at all, would take too long to account for any harm done.

That said, I'm not really doom-and-gloom about the whole thing, it's just an issue I feel deserves attention.

I actually did it, and it took all of about 30 seconds. You have to put your info in so it finds the right constituent in your area, and then tells you exactly what you need to say. I think I spoke with his secretary and she said she would pass my info along to the congressman. What happens from here though. Does she actually tell the congressman I called or does it get thrown in the trash...

 

[Hevach]

I can see your reservation about big content's involvements, but they are the ones who stand to lose the most. More importantly, some of them are the only ones to have so far felt the sting of a non-neutral net. Netflix, Cryptic Studios, Megaupload while it still existed, Infobunker, and everyone else who has ever used Cogent for access has suffered losses because of ATT and Verizon restricting or outright blocking traffic to their sites.

 

[NoParty]

Yes, without getting political or going into the myriad details,
the 'net is (quite accidentally) the greatest thing that ever happened to free speech,
democracy--and the spreading and vetting of ideas--in human history.

The assault on net neutrality could undo so much of the progress
of the last 20 years...a new world that most of us already take for granted.

 

[Jason]

This might seem like a dumb question but is the internet actually being slowed down today in support of Net Neutrality?

 

[Hevach]

No. At least not related to the protest, there's a lot of reasons why the internet may be running slower than normal in some regions if you're experiencing something.n

 

[Mick West]

This might seem like a dumb question but is the internet actually being slowed down today in support of Net Neutrality?

No, just "loading" indicators to show what it would be like.

 

[Jason]

No. At least not related to the protest, there's a lot of reasons why the internet may be running slower than normal in some regions if you're experiencing something.n

The internet in my office was running slower than usual, maybe its the placebo affect because it was brought to my attention.

 

[Svartbjørn]

Looks like this went pretty well.. Thanks Mick, I know Metabunk is relatively small by comparison to a lot of places, but every little bit helps.

https://www.battleforthenet.com/sept10th/#infographic

Content from External Source

 

[Mick West]

I've deleted a cut-and-paste Fox News article. This thread was to explain why I added the pop-up, and that's done now.