I don't have the answer. The document I linked is full of blatant lies pushed by Pai's FCC.
From the release:
- "Internet service providers didn’t block websites before the Obama Administration’s heavy-handed 2015 Internet regulations and won’t after they are repealed. Any Internet service provider would be required to publicly disclose this practice and would face fierce consumer backlash.."
Sourced from tidder, but the ones I have looked into seem legit.
- MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today.
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers.
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites.
AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.
WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results.
MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices.
PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites.
AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing.
EUROPE: A 2012 report from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications found that violations of Net Neutrality affected at least one in five users in Europe. The report found that blocked or slowed connections to services like VOIP, peer-to-peer technologies, gaming applications and email were commonplace.
VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon’s $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction.
AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers’ iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T’s own products.
VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.
I've sent the faxes, made the phone calls. My representatives are onboard with protecting the net. Others are finding that their congressmen/women are already bought and paid for, and will not deviate from the will of their corporate masters. Evidently 'Throw the bums out' isn't an acceptable answer, and monsieur guillotine stays locked away in history books.
Have patience and trust the institutions.
Not the people in them, necessarily. But this year has actually made me appreciate the genius of what the Founders put together.
The thing to remember is that our country has always been pretty much nuts. I'm still going through Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, and the degree to which Hamilton and Jefferson were at each others' throats is unprecedented. Jefferson literally hired a guy at the State Department, officially as its translator, whose real job was to write editorials under a pseudonym lambasting Hamilton as dictatorial and aristocratic. Newspapers, meanwhile, had no ethical code(s) whatsoever. As Jefferson later wrote in a letter to John Norvell in 1807:
- Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
They recognized when setting up our current government that people were terrible, and were careful to make everyone's scrabbling for power counterbalance everyone else's. And remember too that we've survived some terrible presidencies. Bush II, Buchanan (who botched the slavery issue), Harding (who died in office before the country realized how corrupt his administration had been), Andrew Johnson (who fucked up Reconstruction and was impeached for his firing of Secretary of Defense Stanton), etc. And that's without getting into how insanely corrupt local politics was through most of the 19th and into the 20th centuries.
So be angry, but don't lose hope. And channel that anger someplace. Write to your newspaper, tell your friends why Net Neutrality matters, whatever. It's not about changing things all by yourself, but being part of a much bigger whole that can.
I wish that I could read johnnyFive's answer and not just be bitter.
I guess I'm unreasonable and irrational. Probably irresponsible too.
The reality of it is, things are going to suck probably for a good portion if not all of our lives. If there is one thing I've learned is everything is an upward battle. You keep fighting you keep doing everything within your power physically and morally. That's all you can do. You just have to come to terms with the fact you will probably never enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Because all of the other solutions coming to my mind would result in either my death or permanent imprisonment, and I have other shit I want to do with my life, even if we end up in a post-net-neutrality hellscape where I can't actually afford to voice a dissenting opinion.