To you, I exist almost entirely digitally. You can hop onto any computer and type in any one of my URLs and access my websites without any sort of throttling or bottlenecking—my comic is on equal footing with the rest of the internet.
If the internet were no longer neutral, one could imagine a scenario where an artist like myself was silenced through partiality; a website would be bottlenecked so no one would wait for it to load; content you weren’t supposed to see would be buried; and you would be paying more to access presently-accessible information. Net Neutrality is good for everyone, except corporations. So now, we have to fight to preserve our digital landscape.
Today, the FCC officially released their plan to repeal Net Neutrality.
It’s frightening to see it laid out so bare; Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon’s ISPs (corporations already monopolizing most of America’s internet and occasionally already capping/throttling/bottlenecking it with impartiality) all stand to profit immensely from a reclassification at the cost of our freedom of information. Right now, ISPs cannot decide which sites you should access at which speeds. That may change.
We are a country built on free speech, but I guess we never specified freedom of access to that speech. Oh well. Maybe next time we make America we’ll get it right.
PS. Fuck that stupid mug.
EDIT: In the comic, I mention “the vote” is happening “around Black Friday and Thanksgiving.” The vote won’t be until mid-December, but information surrounding the vote was released today (the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday).