‘This Is Net Neutrality’ Coalition Fights for Global Internet Rights

In the wake of US President Barack Obama supporting a free and open internet, ISPs threatening to sue over potential restrictive legislation, and the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) stuck in the middle, trying to keep both sides happy, a coalition of diverse groups from all over the world, including Greenpeace, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Digitale Gesellschaft, has formed to voice its support for net neutrality, on a global scale. The coalition is called This is Net Neutrality, and they issued the following statement, in eleven different languages, on their website on Thursday:

“The open Internet has fostered unprecedented creativity, innovation and access to knowledge and to other kinds of social, economic, cultural, and political opportunities across the globe.

Today, this open Internet is endangered by powerful service providers seeking to become gatekeepers who decide how users can access parts of the Internet. We don’t want to prevent these companies from using reasonable and necessary methods to manage their networks, but these acts cannot be a pretext to eliminate openness nor to police content.

The fundamental openness of this crucial technology must be preserved, and to this end we offer the resources on this site for activists, academics, policy makers and technologists who share our vision.”

The group also outlined their definition of ‘net neutrality’, which informs their use of the word throughout their campaign:

“Net neutrality requires that the Internet be maintained as an open platform, on which network providers treat all content, applications and services equally, without discrimination.”

Deji Olukotun, Senior Advocacy Manager at Access, one of the members of This is Net Neutrailty, summed up the coalition’s all-encompassing view of the issue: “Net neutrality is not an American issue, or a European issue, or an African issue. It is increasingly a global human rights issue.”

Source: Common Dreams