Dear all,
Some of you may have seen that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
in the U.S. has announced its intention
<https://www.fcc.gov/restoring-internet-freedom> to roll back the net
neutrality rules
<https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-open-internet-order> 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 <https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/> (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 <https://policy.wikimedia.org/policy-landing/access/> 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
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement> 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
<https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC>
before July 17. To learn more about net neutrality, you may consult this
useful article
<https://www.wired.com/story/why-net-neutrality-matters-even-in-the-age-of-oligopoly/>
about the issue in Wired. If you are interested in filing your own
comments, we also encourage you to check out this article
<https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/saving-net-neutrality-tips-for-writing-persuasive-comments-to-the-fcc/>
in Ars Technica about making a meaningful submission to the FCC.
Sincerely,
Jan
==
Jan Gerlach
Public Policy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
jgerlach(a)wikimedia.org
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