Chaser said:
This thread is about Net Neutrality, not Trump. Keep on topic or it will be locked.
This is already a political thread which we don't really like to have because they tend to cause problems. Bringing Trump into it(Be it for or against him) is seriously pushing boundaries, and will only be a matter of time before someone gets a record and the thread locked.
Please refer to our Site rules, specifically the Major Religions, Religious Figures, Political Parties, or Political Figures section if you need to know what to avoid in the topic.
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Good morning, Ladies Gents and other of the community. My name is Faux.Pa, and you're all dead.
No, that't not some half-empty threat from some loser on the internet. That's a full-fledged threat from the American government. Even if you don't live in the USA, you're dead too.
What I'm talking about is Net Neutrality, which was a law passed under the Obama administration back in 2015 to prohibit ISPs from treating their access to the internet that they sell to you as a service, and more as a right. But F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, wants that dead. In turn, he effectively wants to break your right as a grown-ass adult to look at yiff. Sound the alarm bells.
Okay, hold on a second, Faux. How is he going to stop that?
Well, lemme tell you, and give you a little of a personal back story.
By removing the Net Neutrality laws that the IFF (Internet Frontier Foundation) and the Freenet fought so dearly for, republicans (not to point fingers, but this does appear to be a republican agenda "in the name of a free and competitive market") are seeking to allow major ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable to control and/or limit the speed to which you can connect to certain websites. Effectively, these ISPs want to create a Internet Fastlane. They could start charging website owners like E621 thousands of dollars (on top of the already hefty hosting fees, domain registry fees and local/federal regulation fees) to include their website in the Internet Fastlane.
In a country that touts itself as being home of the free, land of the brave, we're looking to destroy everything that we've built just so the big corporations can make a quick buck yet again.
Now to my personal story.
From May to October of this year, I worked in a call center for AT&T Mobility as an Advanced Technical Support agent. Since our call center was one of the only that was open 24 hours a day, there's a good chance that one of you may have spoken to me to get your cell phone fixed.
Back to the story. During my time there, I felt like I was part of the call center family, but not part of the AT&T family. The only time AT&T would ever send someone from Corporate is if someone fucked up. You can guarantee that if you saw someone from corporate that someone would be walked out.
All they cared about were stats. How long were you in a call? Did you resolve the customer's issues? Did you use T-I-10? They never cared about morality unless it was one of their corporate-owned call centers that they just absolutely adore. But this next part is one of the reasons why I quit.
I heard the usual ding of the phone, and quickly closed my Google Solitaire tab in Internet Explorer. The customer was an older lady who had sounded very hoarse from either shouting or crying. She told me that she had been in the hospital with her late husband for the last 2 months, and that AT&T had charged her somewhere around $250 for cell phone service that she hadn't been using, as she had her daughter's phone to make phone calls at the hospital. Going over her bill, I was fully-ready to give her a $200 credit for the bill, but I had to get supervisor permission. Since it was over the amount that my supervisor could permit, he too had to get permission from his higher-up.
The request was declined. The way AT&T saw it, she had service going to the phone, and even if she didn't use it, she still had to pay for it. This shows you how heartless these major ISPs can be.
So what does this tell you?
ISPs don't understand the plot of "The Wizard of Oz" (no brain, no heart and no backbone)
ISPs don't understand (or are refusing to understand) how their service is one of the fundamental ways that people all over the world exercise their human right to free speech. The internet may have been created in the 1980s as some government science project, but it has grown to so much more than that.
ISPs don't have the heart to respect their customers. They give you this song-and-dance about how your privacy is their number one priority, but then give you the middle finger when they tell you that their systems are going to systematically block or slow you connection to certain websites.
And ISPs don't have the backbone to tell you that they essentially want to fuck over your right to a free internet, so they leak their intentions via side channels so you don't hear about it until some whiny uber-liberal complains about it on CNN.
These big corporations don't care about us, so why should we care about them? As an American who upholds his right to freedom of speech, and as a human of this big world, I refuse to allow some lobbyist in congress to take away my rights.
We all have a duty to protect those rights.
http://act.freepress.net/letter/internet_faces_nprm_nn/[/b]
Send a comment. Tell F.C.C. chairman Ajit Pai that we won't take no as answer.
Updated by user 252696
