If there were a welcome sign for the Internet, it would read: “Welcome to the world’s only abstract museum displaying the breadth of diversity human nature can exhibit.” People use the Internet to express their ideas and opinions, to share art and education and to connect with others. Some might be surprised to find among all of this diversity the people of the Internet can indeed unite for a common cause. This was assuredly the case when Americans united to protect net neutrality.
Fight For the Future (FFTF), a grassroots non-profit digital rights advocacy group, created a viral campaign called “Internet Slowdown,” an event that took place Sept. 10. The organization reported over 40,000 websites advertised the campaign to their users, 312,171 calls were made and over 2.3 million e-mails were sent directly to members of Congress in support of net neutrality.
FFTF estimates 777,364 comments were filed with the FCC, and the organization believes the actual number is even higher. The group reported that FCC servers went down during the campaign due to the sheer volume of comments submitted, and not all submissions have been counted.
Overwhelming support for net neutrality comes as a response to lobbying from corporations like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner. FFTF says these companies spend over $1 million each week in attempts to lobby the FCC to protect their interests.
These kinds of attempts have been seen before and are in fact where FFTF finds its roots. In 2011, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a bill proposed to the House of Representatives by Texas Rep. Lamar Smith. The Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) was a previously submitted bill, which was killed in the Senate.
These bills were infamous for their protection of the interests of Hollywood movie and TV industries. Language in the bills would allow courts to respond to lawsuits by requiring Internet service providers to prevent access to offending websites. While the target websites for these bills were offshore hosts to pirated content, many organizations and the U.S. public did not approve of the bills, fearing they would be cans of worms. The bills were strongly opposed by companies like Google, Twitter, Mozilla and Yahoo.
FFTF launched two campaigns in 2011 in an effort to raise awareness and opposition to the bills. The American Censorship Day was the second of the organization’s campaigns with over 6,000 websites displaying messages to users to stop SOPA.
On its website, fightforthefuture.org, FFTF features a timeline of its campaigns, punctuated with a bold statement of its bolstered credentials.
“Ever since we organized the first protest against SOPA, we’ve been on a winning streak. We’re best known for our massive, viral organizing and redefining what’s possible using the Internet,” the website said.
The timeline provides brief summaries of other major events. When web company GoDaddy.com publicly supported SOPA in 2011, FFTF designed a boycott. According to the FFTF timeline, GoDaddy quickly withdrew support of the bill.
Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of FFTF, expressed in an e-mail to all participants of the Slowdown day the importance of the campaign in addition to her gratefulness for the millions who contributed.
“Now, more than ever, it’s so clear how powerful the Internet really is as a platform for free speech and how absolutely critical it is that we not only fight for it, but we fight to win,” she said.
