Here’s why net neutrality is a freedom of speech issue
Even if you don’t care about supporting innovation, this is why you should support net neutrality.
This week’s FCC vote on repealing net neutrality will have a profound impact on freedom of speech. The vote is entitled Restoring Internet Freedom, but in reality it does the opposite: it allows Internet Service Providers like Comcast and Verizon to effectively silence whole communities.
Net neutrality rules help to ensure that telecoms providers treat all internet traffic equally. They can’t purposely slow down services they don’t want you to use (for example, because they own a competing one), or charge extra for popular websites. Over on Gizmodo, Rhett Jones describes why this vote is so important:
The telecoms swear that they don’t want to block, slow down, or discriminate against any particular content; they just want the option to do it. According to at least one recent study, telcos have “spent $572 million on attempts to influence the FCC and other government agencies since 2008,” so they can have this option they don’t intend on using. The only reasonable conclusion one can come to is that they fully intend on doing everything they say they won’t.
One way to drive the importance home is to reframe it. While it’s absolutely true that repealing net neutrality protection will allow, for example, Comcast to make Netflix unusably slow unless you pay a surcharge, allowing corporations to discriminate has further-reaching implications.
Forget the Netflix comparison. Forget that net neutrality also protects the ability for startups to enter the market, allowing media insurgents like Blavity to change the conversation. Instead, think about communities like Trans*H4CK. Or Black Lives Matter. Or Human Rights Campaign. Or the millions upon millions of other communities, on all sides of the political spectrum, that support vulnerable and emerging groups.
Websites are communities. Net neutrality rules ensure that all communities are treated equally, and enjoy the same right to connect, publish, and share. Without them, any telecoms provider with an agenda can silence entire groups — without us even knowing it. In a very real way, telecoms companies and their backers will gain the ability to shape the information we receive, and how we perceive the world. Anyone with ownership over the infrastructure can shape the messages that would be allowed to reach us, and with them, the people we can connect with.
Malkia Cyril writes on The Root:
An open internet protected by Title II net neutrality is what enabled #BlackLivesMatter to emerge, not as hashtag activism but as the amplified black demand for police accountability and greater democracy. #MeToo also went viral, not as a simple declaration of past injury but as a powerful demand resulting in a wave of accountability from those who abuse their power through sexual harassment and assault. In the spirit of those who used the internet to demand the ecological and human rights of indigenous communities at Standing Rock in North and South Dakota, immigrant voices are right now using the open internet to demand a clean #DreamActNow, while Muslim digital voices are demanding #NoMuslimBan.
This is not a technical issue: it’s a human one. At a time when underrepresented voices are finally being empowered, repealing net neutrality rules threatens to return them to the shadows. It’s yet another undemocratic move from a white supremacist administration, and is in keeping with those ideals.
The internet is one of the most remarkable inventions in the history of human society. What makes it remarkable is its ability to connect everybody, equally: it’s the ultimate democratic medium.
But we need to fight to keep it that way.
