Correct-o-mundo. E-mail, call or write your Senators. Tell them to vote to keep the Internet neutral. Then tell them again. Today.If you use the Internet for commerce, if you blog, you need to find out more. If you use the Internet for your telephone service, you definitely should be on top of this issue. First, read the blog piece by Susan Kirkland. That’ll get you fired up. Then read “Save the Internet” on the Free Press website.
It’s critical – and complicated. In a tense tie vote yesterday, a US Senate committee rejected an amendment that would have preserved the status quo of equal pricing for all Internet traffic…that’s network neutrality.
It’s about money, of course. The big telephone and cable companies want to kill net neutrality. For example, if net neutrality disappears and you are using VoIP, your phone call could be dropped because it doesn’t meet “their” quality standards. These companies don’t want to give up the long-distance revenue that VoIP is draining from their bank accounts.
Wikipedia says here: Neutrality regulations require network providers (ISPs) to transport all packets on a first come, first served basis except for Denial of Service Attacks, to offer service plans distinguished only by bandwidth, and to refrain from billing third parties for network services.
Think about it this way. A vote to keep the net neutral is a vote for keeping the Internet free of regulation (and the kinds of predatory pricing that phone and cable companies just adore). And speaking of money, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are uneasy about “controlling” the Internet – especially since this is an election year and this has become a hot issue.
This is no “free press” deal – it’s a freedom-of-speech issue. Find your Senator’s e-mail address here. Want to include your Congressional Representative? Find his or her e-mail address here. Do NOT do nothing. Contact your politicians until they agree that the Internet should stay neutral.
1 comment:
It's very easy to petition all your representatives and senators using Save the Internet at http://www.savetheinternet.com/. Simply give them your zip code and they provide all the email addresses you need. Over a million petition signatures have been submitted to Congress from Save the Internet. When the number of signatures was around 800,000, the House passed the bill to "sock it to us" in favor of the big money interests. The money won. The people lost. I hope the million plus signatures and letters coming from Save the Internet will have an effect on the Senate bill.
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