Well, you could call Congress, and you could also protest the end of net neutrality. You should emphasize that the FCC cannot, because of what Obama ensured in making it a utility, erase net neutrality unless, according to the law, they find that net neutrality is illegal. It cannot be overturned unless it is determined to be unconstitutional. Therefore, we need to remind our government of that.
Also, in order to ensure that your own content is not slowed down, you should immediate append your website with an e-commerce component. That could be as simple as including a link to a place where you sell a product. You could also enable advertising if you have enough viewers, and if not, create your own advertisements, but you’ll have to make sure they link to an e-commerce site like Amazon, Etsy, or others, in order to tell the government that they could earn sales tax as long as they don’t slow down your site. The ISPs won’t be able to slow you down if the government says you can’t slow down revenue-generating sites. Any roll back of any regulation, just like everything else, will be nuanced and have many exceptions, and I think this will be one of them. Many blog platforms have a commerce functionality now. Just open the help window and chat with the helpdesk if you’re having trouble setting it up.
Finally, tell your Congressman all the ways you use the Internet, how many times you used it to look up facts for a job interview or a project at school, how you paid for things you couldn’t find at the store, how you learned crucial information before traveling to a country with a shaky tourism record, and how you stayed informed about what’s going on in your town, in D.C., and around the world because you had unfiltered, equal access to information.
Tell them specific information, with references to specific non-revenue-generating web addresses, that led to your decision to elect them. Make sure they know they were elected based on information on these sites.
We have the power to do this. We can make sure the Internet is still a reality for all Americans and all people around the world who want to access websites run here. There are issues regarding international regulations and who should have control over the Internet, and we can make sure our voices are heard there, too, but we need to make sure we don’t censor our own Internet if we’re going to tell the world they shouldn’t censor theirs.
You’ve reached the end of Series 19: Net Neutrality
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