Friends, Teachers, Internet(wo)men,
Lend me your ears. Hear me for my cause, and be silent that you may hear. Today, we are under threat. The past 20 years have been huge in the world of communication around the world – primarily because it has given each one of us a freedom that we previously never had – and it’s called the Internet. It has improved our lives in far too many ways to try to elucidate – and it’s become a freedom we have all taken for granted. It’s a freedom millenials don’t know how to live without. A freedom is more than being able to access a new form of liberation – it is the ability to have the choices of opportunities. And boy has the Internet given us opportunities. We have built knowledge over it, our social lives revolve around it, and many of us don’t remember the last time we visited an electronics store to purchase something.
Entire economies depend on its founding principles of openness, and OpenCurriculum couldn’t exist without inherent faith in the purity and innocence of this medium. There is just no argument around openness when its distribution is like a water faucet whose flow is not democratically controlled and determined.
Yet, here we are, where the stupidities and ignorance of the greedy is dragging us into a hole we might never be able to get out from. For these past few months the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has been very seriously deliberating and moving forward on new rules on network neutrality that allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to discriminate amongst internet traffic. Yes, this is a different form of slavery – and what’s different is that you and us are going to get pretty severely affected in a time when man is not too far from discovering life on other planets.
Anyways, John Oliver from HBO does a much better job of explaining this:
What we are doing about this
We are beginning by not tolerating any of this. Last week, triggered by Alexis Ohanian and eventually assisted by the very amazing Marvin and Lavon Ammori of the Ammori Group, we filed an FCC comment opposing these new set of changes.
What you can do
The open internet has definitely given us power to share URLs – so before it goes away, read what CodeCombat suggests you could to save us from an Internet catastrophe.
Please act now. Time is running out!