A Big Win for Keeping the Internet Free
UPDATE II: A Letter to the Verizon/AT&T Five
UPDATE: The telcos strike back.
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It's a beginning. Matt
Stoller is leading the fight, along with Sean-Paul,
and they deserve a lot of credit for getting other big blogs on the topic. My
FDL post,
inspired by Stoller, got a lot of traction last week. Because of Matt and others
who joined in we got a big win today. But every good battle needs its heroine,
which today is McJoan
over at DailyKos. She posted the numbers of the four Democratic Party representatives
that needed a push and got results. Ah, what a big fat blog can do.
The progressive blogs are really leading this fight, but it's just beginning.
There's still much to do, which begins with all of us continuing to let representatives
and senators know how we feel about keeping the… well, the Internet the Internet.
Because if it isn't free it's not the place I've known for 10 years now. It
shouldn't stop here either.
People need to be educated on what it all could
mean. Again, it's about keeping the Internet free. Talk to your friends and
relatives, people at work. Let them know what's going on. Here's a
video I offered in my post, which is a good primer. Pass it along. The gigantic
telcos want to change the free Internet so they can make money off of it and
they're paying willing politicians to help them do it. The lobbyists are doing
the dirty work, especially one particularly Democrat
who should be ashamed.
There's a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants
to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium
up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to
us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying
for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground.
Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we'll close the rest of
it.I watched the markup and the voting, and there was noticeable defensiveness
among Congressmen on the wrong side of this. They are wrong, they know it,
and they are ashamed. Now they know people are watching. So we didn't win
this vote, but this close margin was nonetheless a smack to the jaw of the
insiders, and a clear victory for the people. Now the battle moves out of
the Energy and Commerce Committee, and onto more favorable terrain.House Committee
Vote Results: The Momentum Shifts in Our Favor
Then write Congress.
Sign the petition.
Keep letting Congress hear how you feel. It's working.
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