They Destroyed Your Privacy. Net Neutrality Is Next

Last night Congress voted to gut the FCC’s broadband-privacy rules, which were designed to prevent your internet service provider from selling your personal data (like your web-browsing history) to advertisers and other companies without your consent. The final vote, which fell largely along party lines, was 215–205.

This matters for two reasons:

1. The people who voted for this dangerous resolution care more about pleasing companies like Comcast than they do about serving you.

2. These rules were built off the landmark Net Neutrality rules — and now those protections are in danger.

The broadband-privacy fight is the Trump administration’s first attack on the open internet. And now that it has a win on its hands, it’s going to push for another.

But this didn’t go down without a fight.

We fought to pass the privacy rules in the first place and then spent the last few weeks delivering tens of thousands of petition signatures, making phone calls, lobbying Capitol Hill and getting the word out on social media.

In the last 48 hours of this fight alone nearly 20,000 people called their representatives to speak out against this legislation.

And while we may have lost this particular battle, we know that protest works. Pushback works. All this activism has caught elected officials off guard. And we’ve seen the effect that calls, petitions and protests are having on issues like health care.

It took 4 million of us speaking out about Net Neutrality to win last time around. It will take even more to save it now. It won’t be easy, but if we build enough power we can win again. Your support makes that possible.