If you live in the United States, your government is about to f&ck you big time.
"Net Neutrality" is the notion that your internet provider can't charge you more for going on Instagram or Netflix than for shopping on Amazon or doing a quick Google Search. Until a few months ago, it was also the law. However, unless the Senate votes to overturn a recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision to let Net Neutrality rules lapse, it will become legal for your ISP to charge you more for certain kinds of internet activity, and worse yet, to censor what you get to see at their discretion.
This is an artwork I did with
Lordess Foudre in support of Net Neutrality. Unfortunately, this is also probably what the internet will look like if the Senate does not vote to save Net Neutrality.
No Net Neutrality means your internet service provider could decide to charge you for visiting Cryptocurrency exchanges to buy and sell coins. They could charge you for reading and posting on Steemit. They could even block access to these sites if they so chose. We've already seen how the credit card companies have reacted to the crypto world. What would happen if Comcast decided it was in its' customers' best interest to "be protected from the volatile world of cryptocurrency"?
Fortunately, all it takes is a simple majority in the senate through something called a Congressional Review Act (CRA) to give the legislature the power to overrule the FCC's decision and preserve Net Neutrality in the USA.
If you are in one of the states highlighted in red below, PLEASE visit THIS LINK to learn more and contact your Senator.
I trust that no one here on Steemit, American or otherwise, wants to see Net Neutrality go away. So please, even if you don't live in the USA, or one of the states above, do your best to spread the word. The hashtag is #onemorevote and the website for this effort is https://www.battleforthenet.com/onemorevote/ . Thanks.
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Youtube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter already ARE F&cking a lot of Americans. These giants that are some of the biggest voices for what YOU and OTHERS are calling Net Neutrality are some of the most anti-free speech, and least neutral places on the planet.
You see labeling something "net neutrality" doesn't mean the label fits.
I believe most of us want TRUE net neutrality, but just giving something a title and playing on people's emotions doesn't make the label TRUE.
What we've had for net neutrality at various times so far was actually nothing of the sort.
Though politicians and propagandists really like latching onto emotionally charged labels that they can bash someone over "You mean you are against net neutrality?"
No. I am for TRUE net neutrality, and these BILLS are not that. Just look at the F&ckers backing this and how neutral they are.
"Deeds not words" - George Washington
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At least we currently have the option to CHOOSE whether we use Facebook, Google, etc. I’d prefer that to being blocked from certain services just because I picked the wrong ISP or phone carrier.
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This is true in some ways, yet it is also a false dichotomy. There are usually more than two choices.
Why back a bill due to its LABEL that is sponsored by some of the most anti-free speech people around?
If we want Net Neutrality, and I mean TRUE net neutrality then we could push for something that is more than just a label.
Also the Net Neutrality that was repealed wasn't actually about BLOCKED it was about being throttled. What Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube are doing goes beyond THROTTLING.
I'd love to see more people come to places like Steemit, DTUBE, and other decentralized platforms.
Yet, I won't let them emotionally manipulate me into giving them even more power to silence those they don't like.
There is a history of BILLS in our government that the NAME of the bill ends up being exactly the opposite of what the bill does. In the age of twitter, often people only read the title.
This is very dangerous.
If you want to be an advocate for true net neutrality I'll be there with you. Yet, don't let them play with words and emotions and convince you that is what they are proposing.
Look deep. Think. Think short term. Think long term.
Thing how you as a bad guy who wanted to game the system might manipulate the new rules to your advantage.
Thinking in those ways if you don't find red flags then perhaps the bill is legit, but these days most bills are in the title and emotions. Look at how many bills they keep passing before they've even read them.
Nancy Pelosi "We have to pass the bill to see what is in it."
One of the dumbest things she has said, though there are many others.
Would you join into a contract with me that I write up before you read it, so that THEN and only then after you've agreed to the contract you can actually read it?
I understand where you are coming from. I do.
I am just saying be careful, and be very vigilant. They like to tug on our heartstrings and emotions to get us to react before we truly know what the contract is.
EDIT: And unless the ISP has a monopoly in your region. You can pick another. :)
I also haven't been seeing much about throttling lately. I have been seeing a lot of talk about censorship.
It's pretty easy to get a pretty fast connection in most places now. Fast enough that they have to throttle it badly for you to even notice. Yet as I said I'm not really seeing that.
There also seems to be a growing number of choices.
What a lot of people don't know is that the previous net neutrality laws actually adversely impacted a lot of startup ISPs and kind of gave the big guys more of an advantage. A number of ISPs went out of business.
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Unfortunately it is literally a dichotomy: let the internet continue to exist without being split into paid “channels” and deal with the big tech companies separately, or see the internet turned into cable television. I don’t want to see the internet turned into cable television. Also, Americans seem to forget that there are other countries where actual, government-enforced internet censorship happens. I’ve lived in some of those countries. They are a lot worse off than we are, with our biggest problem being that we don’t want to pay more to go on a Netflix binge
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Actually it is not a dichotomy. It is false because it is either FOR this bill, or against net neutrality. That is false. There are other choices. Like supporting making a bill that actually was about net neutrality. So it is not a dichotomy. There are more than two choices.
Hell there are probably more than the three I've described, it's all a matter of perspective.
A popular tactic in propaganda today is to try to frame most things as dichotomies, and it is rare that they are not actually false dichotomies. There are usually more than two choices. :)
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Everything in America is a false dichotomy. Just play the game and call your senator already
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Hahaha.... I tried emailing them a few years ago when I was against a certain bill.
I got a nice form letter back thanking me for helping them support the bill I was against. LOL :)
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Cable television is what it is due to government giving them exclusivity deals. This is a danger when we think we are doing GOOD yet the fine print simply blocks competitors and shores up the empire of other entities.
I'm not sure why you think THIS TIME the government would not be corrupt and kissing the ass of lobbyists...
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Because the government doesn’t actually censor the internet. You are right there are many other issues at hand here. But I just want to be able to use the internet normally in peace. The fight against communications companies’ monopolies is a fight for another day
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Yes, yet to be haste NOW is likely to introduce bigger problems down the line.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a bad ISP that other people were FREE to compete against them?
Oh and for the record. I'm a network engineer. I have client locations all over the U.S. and Canada and one of the things I try to do is get my clients two different ISPs with a different last mile.
The reality in most locations is there are only two last mile offerings. There is the local telco infrastructure that is legacy and had those government exclusivity deals and then there is sadly cable.
If you are not familiar with the last mile concept it means regardless of who you get the internet through that last mile to your house is invariably going to go over the same carrier for most of them.
Cable since it was going over coaxial cable was a completely different network, and this is why cable is often the only alternative last mile.
A lot of this is true due to restrictions against competitors.
There are some exceptions to this in some places. In some places you might be fortunate enough to have a local telco that is using a fiber network they built and bypasses the other carrier.
Yet the true problem with throttling can actually be bigger than all of that. Once the traffic gets out there on the backbones those backbones are usually big carriers which are increasingly being acquired by telcos and the telcos are growing bigger gobbling up the variety that is the internet.
It is on these backbones that throttling of competitors traffic like Netflix could impact even people that are not a subscriber to the cable or telco company doing the throttling.
Yet fighting this also provided them ways to kill small competitors. Smaller ISPs have to on ramp to the main internet and connect to one or more backbones.
The previous net neutrality law put a lot of potential competitors out of business.
One thing that some places are doing that is cool is creating a community, or town/city internet provider.
So should we fight throttling? Yes. Yet there are several ways to do this. Involving the government and not paying CAREFUL attention to what they try to do when seeming to address this is highly dangerous.
One way we do this is to stop giving companies business and support their competitors if that is an option.
If it is hitting a backbone and the traffic is being throttled or being treated with bias then it needs to be considered how to deal with that.
Yet there were other TECHNICAL problems that were huge in net neutrality.
Networks support Quality of Service tagging of packets. This means some packets are given higher priority of delivery.
This is for things like voice (for a huge amount of phone calls) and other things that the latency (delay between sender and receiver) must be very low. This type of traffic is typically tagged so it is given priority over other traffic.
If this type of traffic is sufficient then it will at times result in some throttling of other traffic.
Yet just blanket saying NO THROTTLING is dangerous as it technically makes any form of QoS illegal, and that is pretty damn important to a lot of technology.
QoS is not as big a deal on streams usually because they buffer a lot of content. It is more important for things that real time response is required. So a huge amount of phone calls would become very bad quality, and things like Skype and video calling would be dead.
So it is really important not to latch onto any bill because it sounds good in its title.
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Also... thanks for the good conversation. I am glad you seem to have realized right away I wasn't attacking you. :) That makes me happy. I just want people to be a lot more aware of what they are advocating for and not let corrupt politicians bamboozle them by making them think they are supporting one thing, when actually it is a trojan horse.
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Being a network engineer definitely gives you a unique and nuanced perspective on the issue. Most of us are looking at it from a basic consumer/small-business level. I'm more concerned about the free flow of information than anything else. Yes Facebook and Google may be responsible for some level of "censorship" but as private companies that is more or less their right - and by using their services consumers are agreeing to that censorship. However, I (and hopefully most Americans) am much more comfortable with Facebook hiding certain things from my newsfeed and still being able to type in www. any site i want to go to .com and not have to pay extra than I would be about being charged to visit certain websites just because of who I'm already paying to access the internet in the first place. Particularly if those pay walls start going up along political lines. The issues that actually happen on the internet are definitely real and worth taking a serious, critical look at, but in supporting net neutrality I hope that we can at least maintain the prospect of addressing those issues in the future rather than seeing the web carved up according to corporate interests.
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I just hope that this won't come to Europe. Your artwork is completely true. We need to stand together against this. Its absurd that they are doing this in 21. century
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Yeah I hope y'all don't get this BS in Europe. It's really annoying to watch it happening.
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i thought it was already a done deal ... for now in Europe it seems to be holding but i wonder for how long ... good luck with it ... it would open a door for competition with providers who try selling themselves by not throttling anything ofcourse but in the mainstream the fight might be hard since standard people use the same standard services and most megacorp won't fight that
because it's them
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See you'd think that that's how it would work but in America we're uniquely good at charging people more for the same service. Everyone just puts it on their credit card, anyway. Hope you don't get a situation like this in EU.
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well ... the EU is often mistaken for something it's not ... unlike the US that got forged in blood and steal so to speak during the civil war, it actually got united, the EU is just a political and paper union and a lot of ants down here consider it nothing but an extra layer of taxes. Despite that they pass law after law and fine all countries who dont obey them (how they enforce that beats me since there is no such thing as a european military (there are joint efforts ofcourse but thats mostly to help clean up the american mess since Afghanistan and the bushwhackers family lol ... which doesnt mean i consider all americans methsmoking jarheads but the part where the politicians consider themselves "leaders of the free world" is more than often not really appreciated) and despite THAT they DO have a role that holds serious weight on global decision making.
In Europe last year (i think .. im a bit unstuck in time sometimes) Estonia tried to use the witchhunt on piracy to pass some laws that would allow the government almost absolute control over what content could be put online and what not so its not really a certainty and the lobby here might not be what it is there, but it certainly exists and actually
id think your senators and congressmen would have more pressing matters at hand like
https://www.wired.com/story/us-border-patrol-hasnt-validated-e-passport-data-for-years/
... passing patriot acts and all that, then not installing software to check passports that probably cost billions to develop and distribute ... i'd say politics is politics much all over the globe, i like to refer to it as poly-ethics since they put on more faces before breakfast than most of us would wear in a week
its a never ending fight, almost Tolkien-esque, almost like fighting the actual terrorists globally, you just bat an eyelid or fall asleep for five seconds and they pass a law "behind closed doors" named a little differently with a little bit of the text revised but actually it does exactly the same as the one they "would never pass because they heard the voice of the people"
and so on xD
pardon my babble, its a topic that never cools
i hope you can beat the race there (and thx for the vote , much appreciated)
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No one here deals with real issues. Some of our states just made it legal for teachers to carry guns in classrooms to fight off potential school shooters. Uhhh
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8-O ... that should help with concentration lol ... talk back get shot hm ? i don't think real issues are considered politicians jobs, i think they all agree that's for activists ... but teachers carrying guns in school ? i'm already stuck on the fact that every traffic cop here carries a 9mm and full set of baton, mace and the works ... unlike england and such where imo chances at violent crime and bombings are a lot higher ... it all assumes that politicians, judges, cops (and in your case apperently teachers too) are super-human ... they won't snap while the students will ?
probably sounds reasonable too if they give the speech in their $10k suit ...
i dont think id let my kids attend a school where theres cowboys dissin out the order of the day ... what if one of them doesnt like mondays or didnt get laid last night or found his wife in bed with his neighbour ?
they're just supposed to be robocop about it ...
afaik judges are elected there, no ? here they're appointed for life, which means they can't actually make mistakes as such court decisions are never revoked
a court of law, not justice ...
teachers in school carrying guns ... i better not talk about that too much, its been evolving to a police state under the guise of democracy for years now, the right slowly taking over and i have no clue what they wanna do with it since this place with its 10mln people and three national languages and five governments cant do jack fkin shti by itself
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance .... watch for criminals and watch for cops ;-)
im still hoping to see some new tek that puts connectivity back in the hands of the populace, not government, some kind of node system whatever b/c i feel the way things are going they will grab more and more control (while blaming it on the russians and the chinese) ... encryption's one thing but if they got a total killswitch on the actual infrastructure they still can tear it out by the root
(owh im going off topic again xD but i guess thats what i doo, too much festering shit inside my brain ... used to be funky ... i think ... im not sure anymore)
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I can imagine if ISP has the control to what you want to see on the internet. It would be catastrophic indeed. I think it's against freedom and one step near to poor people getting poorer since their simple privilege to explore things with internet freely is about to end.
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Hahaha this is America we don’t officially have poor people, only “the middle class” and “minorities”... the first one gets oppressed with credit card debt, the second gets oppressed by the police :)
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I hope this has nothing to do with Africa. It's saddening that all this is happening.
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I don’t know what the internet political landscape looks like in Africa. I hear there’s substantial government censorship in some countries, though
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No net neutrality is such a bitch. It's so unfortunate that they have to charge so much for not only internet services but certain websites like Instagram etc. Recently millions of activists pressured the Federal Communications Commission to adopt historic Net Neutrality rules that keep the internet free and open allowing people to share and access information of their choosing without interference. No net neutrality denies our right to communicate online freely. I vote in favor of net neutrality.
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yes! We must keep the internet free and open! please spread the word
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Sure thing mate.
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important post, upvoted, followed.
the trend in the united states is for every good thing to be bought, deregulated and resold as a bullshit version like water in Flint, until more people like you are ready to do something, people like me have to live in a different country.
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As it happens 83% of voters are in favour of net neutrality. This is all on the politicians being... well, politicians
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there is no real politics in the united states as of this time.
politics implies people debating over issues and building support among a population of voters. that is not what is happening. cnn is preventing revolt by explaining things the bribed functionaries do in congress while they act without any regard for the actual citizens and only represent institutions like corporations and other expressions of wealth.
no taxation without representation is the rule, and on every important issue the congress has proved it doesn't represent the people. so you should stop paying your taxes, and your debts, if you really want change.
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We have to come together to fight against this thing so that it won't spread to all part of the world,it is really absurd that they would even think of it in this period of advancement in technology
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Right???
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I have a new project , if u want win in bet follow me ;
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@fixedbetwin/introducing-fixedbetwin-experts-in-football-prediction-669293ae34586
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No thanks
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You got a 6.72% upvote from @mitsuko courtesy of @ausxen!
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This post was resteemed by @steemvote and received a 11.94% Upvote
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