What's Really Boffo? Free Press' Week in the News

It’s been just a couple of weeks since a federal court struck down the Net Neutrality rules, but we at Free Press haven’t squandered a second in our fight to save the open Internet.

Last Thursday a Free Press-led coalition delivered over a million petitions urging the Federal Communications Commission to restore Net Neutrality — prompting Chairman Tom Wheeler’s now-infamous “that’s boffo!” comment — and this issue is all over the news too. So if you’re looking to get your friends to join this fight, share some of the links below.

Over the weekend our associate policy director, Chancellar Williams, was on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, where he schooled a corporate apologist about how the free and open Internet is supposed to work:

What we’ve been talking about with Net Neutrality has nothing to do with regulating the Internet. It’s about the access to the Internet, the on-ramps. And for many, many years our communications networks have always been treated as common carriers and what that means is that there’s room for innovation; you don’t have to ask permission to innovate. … There are all these things now like the World Wide Web and instant messaging that this technology enabled. It creates the space for technology to evolve and innovation to take place.

Meanwhile, Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron, who appeared on PBS NewsHour the day after the ruling came down, now has an Op-Ed in the Seattle Times that considers what the Internet might look like in the absence of Net Neutrality:

You’ll experience videos that don’t load, tweets and texts that disappear and websites that freeze and fail. The fast lanes will be reserved for the players with the deepest pockets, while the rest of us — independent content makers, upstart innovators, dissident voices — will be stuck on the slow road.

In a world without Net Neutrality, the Internet you know and love will start to look a lot like cable TV, where a big company picks and chooses the channels for you. Instead of the unlimited Internet, you’ll see different tiers, exclusive deals and higher bills.

A few days after the court decision, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood appeared on a C-SPAN panel on the future of the Internet— and last week in Gizmodo he outlined the easy fix the FCC can implement to restore the Net Neutrality rules. And Internet Campaign Director Josh Levy discussed the ruling’s threats in an interview with Popular Science.

So get these links out to your networks because we’ll win this fight only if people keep speaking out. It really is us against AT&T, Verizon and all the other corporations that want to turn the Internet into their own private ATM. But the more we get this issue in front of people, the more we talk about how simple the fundamental idea of Net Neutrality actually is, the better our odds are.

It’s great — boffo, even — that our petition delivery made such a strong impression on Chairman Wheeler. Now we need to keep the heat on the FCC to restore Net Neutrality and save the Internet we know and love.