Red Alert: How the internet is supporting net neutrality today – CNET


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Red Alert: How the internet is supporting net neutrality today

You’ve probably been asked by a website to contact senators about net neutrality. Find out which sites are taking part, and what they’re actually doing.

If you went on Reddit, Tumblr or any number of other sites today, you probably noticed a call to action to save net neutrality. The Red Alerts, part of a campaign to salvage the policy, have been spread across the web and ask individuals to contact their senators ahead of an expected vote on net neutrality..

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Contact your Senator for Mother’s Day?

Reddit is the center of a number of protests, with individual subreddits hosting their own variations of the Red Alert event. r/Politics, for example, will be home to an AMA with Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, at 2:30 p.m. ET / 11:30 a.m. PT Wednesday. And any moderators late to the action can learn how to set their sub on Red Alert here.

Foursquare, in partnership with Shutterstock, Tinder, Vimeo and Warby Parker, is targeting individuals in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana and Nevada. Those five states are home to senators vital to the Senate’s net neutrality vote. Foursquare claims that by the time the Senate votes, 26 million people will have been reached by ads like this.

Foursquare

Tumblr, warning “it may be our last chance,” had this Red Alert post Wednesday.

And Netflix has previously shown its support, as has the ACLU.

Even Tim Berners-Lee, credited as the man who brought into being the World Wide Web and the first internet browser, tweeted his continued support for the policy.

Senate Democrats took to Twitter as well, trumpeting their efforts to bring the issue to the floor (complete with a Red Alert icon).

The Red Alert campaign itself is part of the Battle for the Net initiative, led by the digital advocacy nonprofit Fight for the Future. The group is rallying support for a day of (real world) protests occurring Monday, May 14.

But those efforts aren’t going unopposed. Even though the Office of Management and Budget has yet to officially sign off on the specific clauses of the net neutrality repeal, FCC chairman Ajit Pai and the White House have shown little indication of backing down. AT&T may even ask the Supreme Court to prevent the Federal Trade Commission from policing net neutrality at all

Looking even further back, it’s not like this is the first time prominent sites and advocacy groups have partnered to bring attention to the issue, with little legislative success so far.

And yes, since you were obviously going to ask, PornHub is part of the Red Alert campaign too. But we’ll let you confirm that on your own time.

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