Inspired by John Oliver‘s rant on Last Week Tonight, I went to the FCC’s comments site and submitted the following comment:

To Whom It May Concern:

Back in the mid nineteen-nineties, a handful of us Internet activists worked mightily to get sensible service plans available to home users. (At the time, the telephone companies wanted people to connect to the Internet over pay-by-the-minute or pay-the-byte ISDN connections.)

Once relatively reasonable options became available to home users, home broadband use exploded, and the Internet became such a part of everyone’s lives that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the present day without it.

Allowing telecommunications companies to define “fast lanes” for some classes of traffic, or some preferred partnerships, turns the future of the Internet over to the same people who nearly stopped it from happening the first time.

The Internet as we know it would not survive this arrangement. It would turn the thriving metropolis we love into the most sterile, and most quickly abandoned, of shopping malls.

Please reaffirm Net Neutrality in its entirety, and do not permit the kinds of preferred-peering agreements that today’s home Internet providers desire — for their continued success, as well as ours.

Thank you,
Jonathan Lasser

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I encourage all of my readers (both of you) to go to the FCC and submit your own comments supporting Net Neutrality.