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[ [link removed]- ]Free Press

Friend, what do waffles, cardboard cats and rickrolling have in common? They’ve all played a key role in Free Press campaigns.

In our 20-year history, we’ve often relied on unusual tactics. In addition to organizing petitions, protests and visits to lawmakers, we’ve gotten creative to get our point across.

With the FCC kickstarting the process to reinstate Net Neutrality, we’re ready to employ new creative strategies to fix Trump-era mistakes and return these basic protections to people like you who use the internet every day. We’ve got our work cut out for us: ISPs like Comcast and Verizon are already stooping to their usual scare tactics to try to sink a policy that large majorities of voters across the political spectrum support.

We need your help to reach a critical $50,000 goal by the end of the year. Make your first-ever tax-deductible donation to Free Press today and DOUBLE your impact on our fight to restore Net Neutrality.

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DOUBLE YOUR IMPACT
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We’re really proud of a few of these standout moments from our Net Neutrality campaign over the years — here’s just a teaser:

September 2010. We greeted FCC agency staffers with waffles and a crucial message — “Don’t Waffle on Net Neutrality!”— in advance of an FCC monthly open meeting. We urged then-Chairman Julius Genachowski to adopt rules based in Title II of the Communications Act, which provides the strongest protections possible. The FCC instead embraced much weaker rules, which a court overturned in 2014. That gave us a new opportunity to fight for Title II …

May 2014. In the wake of the 2014 court ruling, the new FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, initially released a proposal that would have allowed broadband providers to destroy the internet’s level playing field and charge for speedier access online. We kicked off a massive campaign that included lots of protests, a record number of petition signatures and millions of pro-Net Neutrality comments directed at the FCC.

January 2015. Early on a January morning in 2015, hours before the FCC’s first open meeting of the year, we placed 400 cardboard cats we’d made on the lawn outside agency headquarters. We staged a faux fight between a Free Presser in a cat costume and someone outfitted as an old-timey cigar-chomping CEO (representing executives at AT&T, Comcast and Verizon). Needless to say, Net Neutral-i-kitty prevailed … and just a few weeks later, the FCC adopted Title II rules.

2017. As soon as Trump nominated Ajit Pai to serve as the FCC’s chairman, Pai — a former Verizon lobbyist — announced that he planned to repeal these hard-won Net Neutrality rules. In the ensuing months, Free Press launched a nationwide campaign filled with bold tactics — including one that owed something to ’80s heartthrob Rick Astley.

A rickroll is a meme where tricksters fool people into clicking a link to a video featuring Astley’s biggest hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s a prank that symbolizes the internet’s lighter side. During an open FCC meeting in 2017, several Free Press staffers and activists interrupted a speech Pai was giving, blasting the Astley bop over a speaker while singing modified lyrics like “Never gonna give you up, Net Neu-tral-ity, never gonna run around and hurt you.”

Those are just a few of our favorite moments — and we didn’t even mention the 700 protests we organized with partners outside of Verizon stores. But you get the point: This work is hard, especially when the corporate deck is stacked against us — but we won’t back down.

Your gift today fuels the next 20 days, months and years of a fight for a truly open internet and so much more. Will you make your first donation to Free Press with a gift that goes 2x as far?

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Thank you for chipping in when it matters the most,

Dutch and all of us at Free Press

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