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Amazon, Mozilla, Kickstarter, and Reddit Are Staging a Net Neutrality Online Protest (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the Internet's biggest names are banding together for a "day of action" to oppose the Federal Communications Commission (alternative source), which is working to undo regulations for Internet providers that it passed during the Obama administration. Among the participants are Etsy, Kickstarter and Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox Web browser. Also joining the day of protest will be Reddit, the start-up incubator Y Combinator, and Amazon. On July 12, the companies and organizations are expected to change their websites to raise awareness of the FCC effort, which is aimed at deregulating the telecom and cable industries. Mozilla, for example, will change what users see on their screens when they open a new browser window. Other participants include Demand Progress, Etsy, Vimeo, Private Internet Access, Fight for the Future, EFF, DreamHost, Creative Commons, BitTorrent, American Library Association, ACLU, GreenPeace, Open Media, and Patreon. Find more details here.
Pretty much the FCC chairman yawned at the thought of this protest.
"Mozilla should be spending 100% of its time working on its browser! Why are they wasting time doing anything other than rolling back the GUI to the one in Firefox 4.0? I hate the new Chrome look so damned much I switched to Chrome and never looked back."
Shouldn't that be "the *once* popular Firefox Web browser"? (Not a hater; it's my main browser, although the things it has done over the last few years has annoyed me and is starting to push me away.)
I wouldn't call 6.55% US market share and dropping popular.
Mozilla is breaking thousands of extensions in November including uBlock, and is integrating a clippy clone into Firefox as of version 55. It also moved the refresh button again with no way to move it back.
Mozilla can no longer be trusted as a voice on the web as it keeps crippling a once great web browser. in November we will be stuck with spyware browsers or having to pay thousands of dollars to get a Mac to get the new tracking protection in Safari.
Then net is going back to the way it used to be. Nothing new here.
If there's a way to damage the credibility of your cause, just highlight Greenpeace as a key proponent. We'd be better off without them in the mix. They can't even articulate practical solutions to the problems they are supposed to be knowledgeable about, and the average independent mind pretty much laughs at them.
It's nice to see a bunch of special interest groups work towards a goal that generally benefits the American citizens of the net (and certain corporations, at the expense of certain other corporations). Watching the right twist hard on this issue has been yet another source of bitter amusement for me over this last year (and believe me, I've had sources of bitter amusement from ALL political sides over the last year or two).
Here's the lowdown: net neutrality used to enjoy a broad coalition of pretty much everyone- the idea that carriers can't charge based on certain qualifications is a pretty appealing one. Some libertarians like it because the carriers are themselves a kind of monopoly (and therefore shouldn't be allowed the same power over their wires as if it was a free market), most liberals like it because it prevents corporations from screwing over the little guy, and some conservatives like it because it prevents conservative speech from being branded separately or upcharged ("CNN is free, Fox News costs extra!" or somesuch). This changed recently and rapidly: in addition to the more strict market libertarians (who were formerly pretty much the only natural philosophical opponents of net neutrality), the broad base of conservatism, led by Trump, are now opposed to net neutrality. Now it's meddlesome government, and (somehow!) the ability to censor data.
The conservative switch on this is not ENTIRELY surprising, given that the most recent action on net neutrality happened under Obama, but why would conservatives not be in favor of common carrier status? Certainly they don't want to pay more for electricity depending on its use (nor would they be ok with the power company monitoring everything in their house to ensure that they pay the correct rate for "television electricity" versus "microwave electricity"), so why the odd position?
The answer appears to be depressingly top-down. This coalition of dudes listed in the summary is pretty much all liberals (I'm not aware of any that even gave Trump credit for smashing the TPP, which they were opposed to), and they pretty much universally supported the losing Hillary Clinton in the election. Meanwhile, those who stand to benefit from the repeal of net neutrality didn't use their bully pulpit to denounce Trump for two years straight, and are broadly more Republican donors. That part I guess is part and parcel of our vaguely corporate Republic, but it is darkly amusing to watch the needs of the donors DRAG THE PHILOSOPHY IN REAL TIME. Just nuts.
> in November we will be stuck with spyware browsers or
Or maybe getting Iridium, a chromium-based browser that removes the google tracking present in Chromium (and Chrome)?
https://iridiumbrowser.de/
Or maybe checking out Pale Moon, based on an older baseline of Firefox?
https://www.palemoon.org/
(note that the Pale Moon guy is also going to be building a browser based off of the Firefox baseline that supports the current extensions)
It's true, you'll still need a spyware browser for Netflix, and probably a couple other websites. But that doesn't mean you have to do 95% of your browsing there, when there are other alternatives.
Also there's that Brave browser, but I'm not sure on all the details about it being a non-spy browser yet.
I've been using Waterfox for years. It's based on the current branch of FF main but strips out the tracking bits and enables features Mozilla has disabled (NPAPI for those who still have need of it).
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Whither NetFlix?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Start demanding $20/day from IP addresses originating in D.C. to get more than 5KB/s transfers. Shouldn't have any complaints about that, should they?
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The Government remembers the SOPA protests, and will ignore net neutrality protests.Even Wikipedia protesting won't help this time, As Wikipedia is known to use its own "secret police" called checkusers to ban users they don't agree with. If you want net neutrality, set up your own mesh networks, and allow users who want to download terabyte sized files for free on it.
This is a non-starter protest. And I think Netflix CEO Reed Hasting's opinion on Net Neutrality "We're big enough not to care" is likely shared by the others, they just won't say it. Now that Yahoo is owned by Verizon, even they won't be part of the 'opposition'. Cards are falling into place very nicely for our corporate information overlords. Kudos to you Bezos and Amazon. You might be the last tech titan with actual principles.
If you're itching to get a Mac and don't want to fork over the thousands of dollars just run the Mac OS on a VM.
FTFY. They were already deregulated thanks to the $400 billion broadband scandal where they took taxpayer money, promised fiber and associated speeds and bandwidth directly *to the home* @ $20/month in the late 1990's in exchange for no regulation. We got the oligopoly that exists today and no fiber. That's fraud and, if the large companies in "protest" were really in protest, they would demand the Attorney General file a fraud case against the telecoms and get the AG to throw the CEOs and other people at the top in prison and then persuade Congress to pass appropriate regulation legislation that should have been applied a long time ago when it was obvious the telecoms would never meet their responsibilities. If anyone complains? Then toss them in prison too for good measure.
wtf?!
Mozilla, for example, will change what users see on their screens when they open a new browser window.
I get tired of Google popping up the notice that I can make Google my default search engine (when it already is) and I can make Google my home page (which it will never be.) Imagine if Mozilla somehow hijacks the "about:blank" home page I have configured so I start seeing crap from Mozilla.org instead of a blank page.
Oh, wait, Firefox ALREADY ignores my home page setting on a regular basis, depositing me at a CentOS welcome, even after being configured to a blank home. And when you first start it up, it automatically runs home to momma and reports the installation details before you have any option of telling it not to.
ISPs are able to selectively throttle Internet traffic to/from certain websites because they enjoy a government-granted monopoly. Customers can't switch to a different ISP even when they know throttling is going on.
Why can't websites create a pseudo-monopoly of their own? What if all the websites concerned about net neutrality joined a net neutrality pact? If any member of the pact detected that an ISP was throttling traffic to their site, all pact members would throttle their traffic to that ISP. So if an ISP tried to throttle Netflix, all of their customers trying to access Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. would find those sites slow to load as well, and would flood the ISP with complaints. Unlike ISP throttling which looks to the customer like the slowdown is specific to the Netflix site and leads them to (incorrectly) conclude the problem is with Netflix, this slowdown across a wide range of sites would cause customers to (correctly) conclude the problem is with their ISP. And blame would fall upon the correct culprit.
Waterfox follows Firefox very closely. There are plans to continue to support normal extensions in a new codebase, but we'll see. The big thing is, when Firefox throws away its older extension model, some browsers will continue to support that, and others will not, and I think it is a hard prediction.
I'll definitely check out Waterfox around that time though, thanks.
on yo momma
When corporations lobby government to enact a law, citizens should be worried....very worried.
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