Petition for Net Neutrality

Abe Froman · April 25, 2014

As many of you may know, there is an ongoing situation in the United States involving our ISPs who want to take a tighter grip on the internet by allowing any ISP to throttle the bandwidth of any traffic that runs through them, among other things. I'm not really one to explain why this is bad and how it could get worse, so if you don't already know about the issue, here are a few videos/articles to help inform you:

Huffington Post: (contains a great summary of the basics) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/24/net-neutrality_n_5206510.html
Tek Syndicate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0cS6mTIAA8

ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/net-neutrality

There is now an open petition on whitehouse.gov to maintain net neutrality, and it needs 100,000 signatures within the next month for it to be considered. I ask all of you Americans out there to please sign this petition (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/maintain-true-net-neutrality-protect-freedom-information-united-states/9sxxdBgy)so that we can continue to operate on the internet as we have up to this point. For those of you who aren't in the United States, do not disregard this as if it doesn't concern you. If the ISPs in the US are able to do it lawfully, it will no doubt spread to many other nations as well. If we stop it now, it could even trigger nations with notably worse situations involving their ISPs to reverse policies and allow for a more free internet. Please, share this with your friends and speak up for net neutrality. I haven't posted on the LTT forums before, I usually just read them, but I feel that this is a very important issue to be active about.

bob345 · April 25, 2014

As much as I would like this to work, they only way anything will happen is if the people with the money change their minds. If it won't make money, forget about it. The side with the bigger wallet will always win in these situations.

JustTooDank · April 26, 2014

I hate to break it to you, but those whitehouse petitions mean diddly squat. They almost never respond to them, and when they do, it is a completely not serious response. It's a huge waste of time. All you do by signing those is contribute to your NSA profile.

The only way we can fight this is to vote with our wallets. Stop buying their services. If the ISPs lost even 30% of their users overnight they would change up.