Hello fellow denizens of the web. It's my displeasure to speak with you on this night, the brink of the apocalypse.

As many of you may have heard, the FCC just voted down Net Neutrality rules that protect you and I from the same manipulative corporate strategies that chased many of us millennials away from cable television.

If this is the first time you've heard of this, here's what you have to look forward to:

1) Telecom companies selectively throttling traffic to services they consider to be "high impact".

2) Your internet plan's pricing structure being restructured in such a way to block you from accessing a variety of content for reasons of ensuring that "heavy users" don't congest the network traffic of other subscribers.

3) An increase in the number of malicious ads as free services are forced to pay your provider to avoid throttling.

4) A decrease in privacy as your provider will be looking at usage trends to find ways to maximize profits off of your use of the internet as a whole. Your activity on the net will now impact your bill, rather than your agreement alone.

5) Potential interference with your traffic as a whole, as carriers are no longer barred from refusing to serve traffic through VPNs, and no longer barred from throttling servers hosted from your machine. Worse, many of these companies may decide to start interfering with ad blocking listservs and open source software communities.

Welcome to the future. The FCC's justification for voting against your interests as a consumer, and as a citizen of the web were ironically to increase the freedom of the internet as a whole, and to encourage growth of the platform.

The real irony, though, is that the internet has grown and disrupted the global entertainment empires thanks to their failure to adopt the technology early on. We grew the internet, each and every one of us as a communal, collaborative environment where the thoughts, wants, and needs of every single one of us were being shared globally in real time on equal footing. Thankfully, the major telecom giants dismissed the Internet's viability as a mainstream media platform for years. It's only when their profit margin began to suffer their disdain for us, that they began their silent bid for control.

Companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T have pledged their support for Net Neutrality in the past while openly donating to the coffers of anti-regulation shills like Ajit Pai. In a bold move of classic, transparent regulatory capture, Ajit Pai, former Legal counsel for Verizon Communications, was appointed to the Chairmanship of the FCC. Within mere weeks of his appointment, he began to undermine every regulation he could possibly reach from his position, stating that regulations, even those so blatantly pro-consumer and anti-extortion as Net Neutrality, are designed to increase innovation on the internet.

Pai and his counsel have elected, despite clear evidence of foreign and possibly corporate manipulation of the public comments section for the move, to ignore the overwhelming majority of legitimate comments, and to completely decline comment on the millions of illegitimate and fraudulent comments submitted during the public commentary period. These spineless asses have even gone so far as to decline any public participation in the process, stating "Public opinion did not shape the outcome of [the plan to repeal the Net Neutrality rules]".

And to make matters worse, this goofy fuck had decided to mock the importance of these decisions, knowing full well what their repeal means to consumers.



Not a fan? Let your voice be heard by voting in the poll included in this post. Actually, don't bother unless you are voting with money. Fuck you. Pay me.


Want to actually do something about this? Live in the US? Flood your state representatives with complaints as to the state of the FCC's shameless regulatory capture, and demand an investigation into the conflict of interest wrought by industry insiders and leveraged paid campaign contributions influencing public policy that the people explicitly oppose.

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials