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Break the Internet: a last ditch attempt to save net neutrality

Fight the Future activists say get creative: call lawmakers, change your Facebook status to married and list your partner as net neutrality.
Written by
December 13, 2017
Naked Security Break the Internet FCC Fight for the Future internet slowdown day Net neutrality PIPA protest SOPA

What are you doing calmly reading Naked Security? Your time would be far better spent freaking out about the end of net neutrality.

Or, in the words of one of many messages put forward by Fight for the Future’s Break the Internet campaign:

Besides urging users to post on social media – the campaign has posted messages (such as that one above) that individuals can easily click to send out on social media – websites are also participating to “stop the FCC,” including Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, reddit, Tumblr and YouTube. The sites are coming up with creative ways to get their audiences to contact Congress before net neutrality’s neck gets laid on lawmakers’ chopping blocks come Thursday.

“Creative,” as in… well, words fail me. SB Nation is a prime example. It’s usually a site dedicated to sports news, video, commentary and community. As of this Tuesday, it was dedicated to insanity.

It’s in keeping with this week’s “Break the Internet” protests, which are similar to the “Internet Slowdown Day” of 2014, when the spinning wheel of page-will-never-ever-ever-load death took over much of the internet, as companies reminded people what an internet without net neutrality would look like and thereby drove public comment to lawmakers.

Another such was the “Internet Blackout Day” of 2012, which involved protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The activist group Fight for the Future was behind the organizing of all these protests, and the idea has been consistent: to show what the web looks like without net neutrality, be it by changing their logos, slowing down page loading, or by showing fake popups to scare users by asking for extra money to access the website.

The protests have worked in the past. But does the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) even care, at this late date? The proposed rollback of net neutrality regulations seems to be inevitable, in spite of more than six months of reports of fake and bot-generated comments flooding the FCC’s public comments space and, most recently, a demand from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Monday that the 14 December vote be postponed.

The FCC has finally agreed to help investigate what appear to be at least 1 million fake comments, but only after refusing nine previous requests for FCC logs to show the origin of the comments.

Nonetheless, there’s still time to fight the good fight.

That’s where you come in. Fight for the Future has a website that helps you join in the protest, offers tips, and asks you to write to your representatives. The effort will run until tomorrow, 14 December.

Fight for the Future organizers have a ton of suggestions on making your voice heard, including changing your Facebook status to married and listing your partner as “net neutrality.” You can also add a “new job” position to your LinkedIn profile called “Defending Net Neutrality at BattleForTheNet.com” – this will trigger a notification to your network and potentially persuade more people to take action before the vote.

Telling big internet companies to join the Break the Internet campaign is another way to fight. Companies that are already on board include Imgur, Mozilla, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, BitTorrent, Pornhub, Patreon, Funny Or Die, Speedtest, Fiverr, Cloudflare, Opera, Trello, the Happy Wheels game, DeviantArt, AnimeNewsNetwork and BoingBoing.

Want to make some noise?

Check out the protest’s page for all the noise you could wish for, and then let your flying net neutrality monkeys FLY!


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13 Comments

Sorry but I’m just not freaking out. I doubt this will end the world as we know it. I could be wrong, but so could you.

To be frank (or henry or even bob) I have yet to see any benefit from “Net Neutrality”. My broadband connection is still lacking, my service rates are getting higher and I still can’t get anything without going through a lot of trouble. Things I could do and see on the Internet 10 years ago now cost me my first born in service fees. All of this hype about breaking the internet is so much wind from the southbound end of a northbound mule. It is about money plain and simple. Forgive me folks but it is too late. The Internet is already broken. More regulation won’t fix it. @Ms. Vaas – Forgive an old man his rants. Your commentary deserves better. :)

Just what I love to see here… pure journalism, totally unbiased reporting.

Regardless of anyone’s particular perspective on the issue, I wish everyone would see the efforts described above for what they are: propaganda… rabble-rousing social media attacks intended to stir up a mob mentality to achieve a goal, no matter whether it’s right or wrong.

The ends do not justify the means.

So is US based FCC going to throttle my Australian destined, European originated content just because it happens to be routed via an NSA controlled communications link that is provided by an US carrier?

Once upon a time, the USA was happy to LEAD the Free World, now your administrations wants to OWN it!

Shame, GOP. Shame!

For people who don’t know what net neutrality is or dont understand what it means :

Net Neutrality comprises a set of policies that empower Internet users to use the Internet freely like broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of content, application, services, or any classes thereof or they must not favor some internet traffic over other internet traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind.

Net Neutrality is the guiding principle of the internet. It preserves our right to browse freely and communicate openly over the internet. Without Net Neutrality, it will be no different than that crappy cable TV service which shows a limited number of channels, all with bad picture quality.

But internet today is a free market, and enforcing Net Neutrality would be like the government impeding the freedom of this market. and abolishing it would encourage investment in the ISP sector.

All points considered I think Net Neutrality should stay. Net Neutrality is the key to freedom and fair competition on the internet, and its repeal would not only result in irreparable damage to consumers, but also everyone in almost every industry.

Net neutrality (NN) is a way of removing market dynamics from the Internet.

For four decades the Internet seems to have lived without NN. Why we all of a sudden needed to shackle ISPs with it is a question I can’t answer.

If the FCC really wants to fix this problem, then in addition to removing the poorly designed NN rules, they need to bring ISPs under their control and out of the control of local governments, where they almost all enjoy monopoly status. Get rid of monopolies, and the price-fixing problem will correct itself.

“Oh no!! Now ISP’s can throttle some users and provide high speed pipes to others!!!” It’s called business folks. There’s nothing wrong with “pay to play”. All of us have to do it. Want more speed? You buy a higher tier package. Want to upgrade from your Volkswagen to a Maserati? Be my guest if you can afford it. Much ado about nothing. Net neutrality would equal the government making partnerships with various corporations based on the politics of the president and the administration at the time, and they would make deals to benefit the corporations. The less government is involved the better. Looked what they did to health care. Competition is the way to go folks. That’s why the internet as we know it exists today.

It’s not “Want to upgrade from your VW to a Maserati”, it’s “You want to drive a VW on this road? Sorry, that’s a premium. Oh, and your wifes Honda isn’t allowed at all to drive here, because Honda wasn’t willing to pay us.”. It’s not that they throttle users based on what they pay, that’s already the case. You buy a certain bandwidth for a certain price. What they can throttle now is traffic based on content or source. I.e. if you want to watch Netflix, they charge you and/or Netflix extra.

Interesting that the (at least apparently) well thought out comments show up here, while the FCC mostly received none of the above. I guess Sophos attracts more people who work at big ISPs and so forth than I thought it did, being generally sane.

Also just going to point out that despite his sort-of-vendetta with Trump and his policies and appointees, Mr Bezos and Amazon are staying rather out of this one. Another chance to use superior cash reserves to bully Netflix, you say?

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