Dear all,

Some of you may have seen that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. has announced its intention to roll back the net neutrality rules that have been in place since 2015. In response, a group of digital rights organizations has mounted a campaign to save those rules. Today, we want to call your attention to that campaign, which peaks in a day of action on July 12 (today). Many of our close allies in the movement for openness online, such as Creative Commons, EFF, Mozilla, and the ACLU, support the campaign and are asking their communities to speak out in favor of net neutrality.

We believe that net neutrality and the FCC’s current rules protect access to knowledge for everyone and prevent the internet from becoming a tiered network where internet service providers abuse their market power for profit gain, rather than for the benefit of consumers. If these protections go away, we could see a new form of digital divide, in which some people only have restricted access to knowledge despite being online. This is in conflict with the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to empower people to participate in finding, creating, and sharing knowledge freely and without constraint. A roll-back of the FCC’s net neutrality rules would also negatively affect the Wikimedia projects as some people would no longer be able to find the information they seek online and collect it on the sites that we host.

We invite you to also submit your views on net neutrality directly to the FCC via their electronic comments filing system before July 17. To learn more about net neutrality, you may consult this useful article about the issue in Wired. If you are interested in filing your own comments, we also encourage you to check out this article in Ars Technica about making a meaningful submission to the FCC.

Sincerely,

Jan