The Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality was an event on July 12, 2017, in which various organizations and individuals advocated for net neutrality in the United States. The event was a response to plans by Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai to end United States government policies which establish net neutrality. Over 50,000 websites, including many organizations, contributed activism after Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, and Free Press convened the event. [1] The group called it "the largest online protest in history", a term which had previously referred to protests against Internet censorship in 2012. [2]
The event sought to contact members of Congress and the FCC. [3] The protest noted that Ajit V. Pai formerly worked at Verizon, a company which opposes net neutrality. [3]
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings publicly stated that net neutrality was no longer a primary concern for Netflix and that it would not participate. [21] [22] [23] Netflix later reversed their position and decided to support the campaign. [13] [24] [25] Prior to the Day of Action there was speculation Tumblr would not participate after Verizon acquired their parent company, Yahoo!. [26] Tumblr would in fact be a noted participant, [27] [28] [29] with their logo featured prominently on Battle for the Net's website along with other major supporters. [30] [9]
Wired commented that the activism was a result of opposing sides of large organizations, with traditional telecom organizations as the target of protest and new media organizations as the protestors. [31] Recode criticized companies such as Facebook and Google for holding back and posting messages that were unlikely to reach a large fraction of their users. [32] [33]
In response to the protest, some of the targeted ISPs stated that they supported the spirit of net neutrality but not the specific regulations passed in 2010 and 2015. [34] Comcast called them "outdated" and Verizon called them "1930s style". Despite AT&T's opposition to net neutrality rules, a statement on the company webpage stated that it was "joining" the protest. AT&T's participation was rejected by the principal organizers of the event. [35]
Yahoo is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon.
Network neutrality, often referred to as net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, offering users and online content providers consistent transfer rates regardless of content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. Net neutrality was advocated for in the 1990s by the presidential administration of Bill Clinton in the United States. Clinton's signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, set a worldwide example for net neutrality laws and the regulation of ISPs.
In the United States, net neutrality—the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should make no distinctions between different kinds of content on the Internet, and to not discriminate based on such distinctions—has been an issue of contention between end-users and ISPs since the 1990s. With net neutrality, ISPs may not intentionally block, slow down, or charge different rates for specific online content. Without net neutrality, ISPs may prioritize certain types of traffic, meter others, or potentially block specific types of content, while charging consumers different rates for that content.
Verizon Communications Inc., is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the United States, with 114.2 million subscribers as of September 30, 2024.
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
US Uncut was a decentralized direct action group in the United States established in February 2011 to draw attention to corporate tax avoidance, cuts to social spending, and public sector jobs.
Ajit Varadaraj Pai is an American lawyer who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2017 to 2021. He has been a partner at the private-equity firm Searchlight Capital since April 2021.
The Internet Association (IA) was an American lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., which represented companies involved in the Internet. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Beckerman and several companies, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook, and was most recently headed by president and CEO K. Dane Snowden before shutting down.
Fight for the Future is a nonprofit advocacy group in the area of digital rights founded in 2011. The group aims to promote causes related to copyright legislation, as well as online privacy and censorship through the use of the Internet.
Internet.org is a partnership between social networking services company Meta Platforms and six companies that plans to bring affordable access to selected Internet services to less developed countries by increasing efficiency, and facilitating the development of new business models around the provision of Internet access. The app delivering these services was renamed Free Basics in September 2015. As of April 2018, 100 million people were using internet.org.
The Day We Fight Back was a one-day global protest against mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the UK GCHQ, and the other Five Eyes partners involved in global surveillance. The "digital protest" took place on February 11, 2014 with more than 6,000 participating websites, which primarily took the form of webpage banner-advertisements that read, "Dear Internet, we're sick of complaining about the NSA. We want new laws that curtail online surveillance. Today we fight back." Organizers hoped lawmakers would be made aware "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."
Verizon Communications Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, 740 F.3d 623, was a case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacating portions of the FCC Open Internet Order of 2010, which the court determined could only be applied to common carriers and not to Internet service providers. The case was initiated by Verizon, which would have been subjected to the proposed FCC rules, though they had not yet gone into effect. The case has been regarded as an important precedent on whether the FCC can regulate network neutrality.
Zero-rating is the practice of providing Internet access without financial cost under certain conditions, such as by permitting access to only certain websites or by subsidizing the service with advertising or by exempting certain websites from the data allowance.
Internet Slowdown Day, part of the "Battle for the Net" initiative, was a series of protests against the repeal of net neutrality laws coordinated by websites and advocacy groups in the United States occurring on September 10, 2014. The official site explains: "On September 10th, sites across the web will display an alert with a symbolic 'loading' symbol and promote a call to action for users to push comments to the FCC, Congress, and the White House."
Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, one of several owned by adult entertainment conglomerate Aylo. As of August 2024, Pornhub is the 16th-most-visited website in the world and the most-visited adult website.
Netflix Inc. is an American technology & media-services provider, production company, and owner of the streaming service, Netflix. The company is headquartered in Los Gatos, California and was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California. This is an abridged history of the formation and growth of Netflix, which has grown to become the largest entertainment company in the United States in terms of market capitalization as of 2020.
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational technology company that focuses on media and online business. It is the second and current incarnation of the company, after Verizon Communications acquired the core assets of its predecessor and merged them with AOL in 2017. The resulting subsidiary entity was briefly called Oath Inc. In December 2018, Verizon announced it would write down the combined value of its purchases of AOL and Yahoo! by $4.6 billion, roughly half; the company would be renamed Verizon Media the following month in January 2019.
"Net Neutrality" is the first segment devoted to net neutrality in the United States of the HBO news satire television series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It aired for 13 minutes on June 1, 2014, as part of the fifth episode of Last Week Tonight's first season.
"Net Neutrality II" is the second segment of the HBO news satire television series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver devoted to net neutrality in the United States. It aired on May 7, 2017, for 19 minutes, as part of the eleventh episode of the fourth season, and the 100th episode overall.
Evan Greer is an American activist, writer, and musician from Boston, Massachusetts. They are the deputy director of the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future. Greer identifies as nonbinary.
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