I have previously shared emails sent from Fight for the Future. Although there have been major victories to keep net neutrality alive, Comcast and friends are still trying to kill it. This email, from Charlie Furman, discusses the future of the battle of net neutrality:
Dear Fight for the Future member,
Good news. This morning, the FCC released the full text of the historic new net neutrality rules, and now it’s clearer than ever that these rules will protect free speech, and that Comcast and their allies in Congress have been lying to you.
You can read them in full here — but since it’s 313 pages (of fiery, Comcast-slaying justice), we wanted to give you a quick rundown of what the rules do and don’t do. But don’t stop reading after the summary, because Comcast is already on the attack and there’s more to do right now.
-ISP’s and their friends in government can’t block you from visiting a website. So you can visit any site that you want.
-They can’t slow down access to websites. So the sites you want to visit will come to you as quickly as the sites Comcast wishes you were visiting.
-They can’t speed up or make certain websites load faster. This is absolutely critical, because if they could speed up certain sites, that functionally means slowing down other sites.
-They can’t get between you and any content, application, service, or anything else that you want to access online. That is explicitly one of the rules. Just in case the other rules don’t cover something.
-There are no new taxes or fees anywhere in the rules, and there’s nothing limiting investment. At all. Period.
All of that is to say two simple, wonderful words: we won. And not only that, we won because of the work of people like you. Activism is mentioned time and again in the rules, and there’s barely an article written that doesn’t talk about it.
But the fight isn’t over yet. Comcast has been scheming about how to use a corrupt Congress to kill net neutrality since before the FCC even voted on the rules. Last week, the House introduced a bill to kill the rules. Next week, there are three different hearings about them.
We can’t let Comcast’s attacks get any traction — these new rules do everything that the public fought for. Now we need to defend them and end this fight for good.
These rules are built on almost a decade of groundwork, but the last year is when we really kicked this fight into high gear. Check out our timeline of everything that happened over the last year, from camping out outside of the FCC, to some of the largest Internet protests in history.
Thanks for helping us win net neutrality — and for helping us protect it.
Charlie, Tiffiniy, Holmes, Evan, Jeff, and everyone at Fight for the Future
There is much work to be done to ensure that not all is lost. Comcast is trying as hard as it can right now to get its way with congress. Don’t let it!
