Tech Giants Rally Today in Support of Net Neutrality (theverge.com)
From a report: Technology giants like Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Google, Twitter and many others are rallying today in a so-called "day of action" in support of net neutrality, five days ahead of the first deadline for comments on the US Federal Communications Commission's planned rollback of the rules. In a move that's equal parts infuriating and exasperating, Ajit Pai, the FCC's new chairman appointed by President Trump, wants to scrap the open internet protections installed in 2015 under the Obama administration. Those consumer protections mean providers such as AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon are prevented from blocking or slowing down access to the web. Sites across the web will display alerts on their homepages showing "blocked," "upgrade," and "spinning wheel of death" pop-ups to demonstrate what the internet would look like without net neutrality, according to advocacy group Battle for the Net. But most of the pop-ups The Verge has seen have been simple banners or static text with links offering more information.
I think it's optimistic to think that something will happen even when 4-5 big companies bitch about it.
I also suspect this might be part of a new "distract and conquer" scheme, where the right wing* political elites make threats to things that matter in order to get some awful things past us. It's hard to take away social security, net neutrality, education, social safety net programs, sane drug laws, protection from discrimination, health care coverage, environmental protections, AND let the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes individually because of push back. Do them all simultaneously though and you'll get some of it.
(* Yes, right wing, fuck off with that fake equivalence bullshit. The american left wing isn't doing anything nefarious at the moment, and the bad things they've done in recent history have mainly been because the right wing idiots had too much power to do the right thing)