John,
I still can’t quite believe that we finally have proof.
If you’ve been following Fight for the Future for a little while, you’ll know that we helped organize some of the largest online protests in human history in defense of net neutrality—the basic principle that says your cable and phone company can’t discriminate, charge unfair fees, or tell you what websites and apps you can and can’t use.
And you also may remember that we helped investigate and expose millions of fraudulent comments opposing net neutrality that were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), many of them using real people’s names and addresses stolen without their permission. Well, earlier this month, the New York Attorney General issued a scathing report that proves once and for all that the nation’s largest broadband companies paid for that fraud.
Broadband for America, which represents Big Cable giants like Comcast and Verizon, spent more than $8.5 million hiring shady astroturf firms to create the false appearance of support for Ajit Pai’s resoundingly unpopular repeal of net neutrality.
Now that we have smoking gun proof that telecom monopolies funded a massive operation to undermine the democratic process and drown out the voices of real people, we’re going to pursue every avenue possible to hold them accountable. And we’re going to keep fighting to ensure that the damage they did is reversed when the FCC restores net neutrality.
We’re also going to keep demanding answers. We want to know if the companies that funded this criminal activity generating fraudulent comments also paid for the hacker-for-hire ring that was caught targeting Fight for the Future and other pro net neutrality advocacy groups at the exact same time.1 And we want to know what high level officials in Ajit Pai’s FCC knew about this fraud, and when they knew about it.
Internet Service Providers like Comcast and AT&T are some of the most politically powerful companies in the world. And now Big Tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are operating from the same playbook. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year purchasing influence in Washington, DC and state legislatures through campaign contributions and lobbying.
We’ll never match their millions, but we’ve seen time and time again that when people come together and fight, we can take on corporate power and government corruption and win. Fight for the Future plays a crucial role, helping channel outrage and attention into real political power by harnessing the power of the Internet to help ordinary people make their voices reverberate in the halls of power. If you support our mission, please consider becoming a monthly donor. Even $5 or $10 a month makes a huge difference in our small, efficient budget.
More on this soon, thanks for all you do!
-Evan at Fight for the Future
Footnotes:
1. EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/phish-future
Fight for the Future works to protect your rights in the digital age.
