We recently received the following White House petition by e-mail and hope you will sign it:
we petition the Obama administration to:
Restore Net Neutrality By Directing the FCC to Classify Internet Providers as “Common Carriers”
On January 14, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s open internet rules, commonly known as “Net Neutrality” because ISPs are not classified as “common carriers”. This ruling allows ISPs to charge companies for access to its users and charge users for access to certain services. Fewer companies will be able to afford access for innovative ideas and products.
We urge the President to direct the FCC to classify ISPs as “common carriers” so that the words of the FCC chairman may be fulfilled: “I am committed to maintaining our networks as engines for economic growth, test beds for innovative services and products, and channels for all forms of speech protected by the First Amendment.”
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We at FGI believe that the loss of net neutrality would be devastating to government agencies, universities, libraries, political activists across the entire political spectrum, anyone who depends on the internet for communication and/or cause promotion. If the Internet Service Providers are allowed to put up toll booths, only those content providers who can afford it will be able to have their content swifty download. All other content will wind up taking awhile. Given that many people will give up on a page that won’t load after ten seconds, this sort of delay will muzzle everyone.
Having to pay above and beyond base bandwidth costs will also make many audio and video sites cost prohibitive to maintain. We will have a much less diverse net with only ISP approved content if we let Net Neutrality go.
If you agree, please sign the White House petition. We have until Valentine’s Day to gather 100,000 signatures to force an Administration response. Don’t wait.
Hat tip to Diedre Conkling for this item.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I signed it.