[Int-koordination] WG: Would you be able to help Fight for the Future contact European Pirates on their Net Neutrality campaign?

["Thomas Gaul" <thomas.gaul AT piratenpartei.de>]

Hi!

 

FYI und unsere Diskussion.

 

Beste Grüße

 

Thomas

 

Von: jpokeefe AT gmail.com [mailto:jpokeefe AT gmail.com] Im Auftrag von James O'Keefe
Gesendet: Dienstag, 21. Juni 2016 18:18
An: Thomas Gaul <thomas.gaul AT piratenpartei.de>
Cc: Joe Thornton <joethorntoniii AT gmail.com>
Betreff: Would you be able to help Fight for the Future contact European Pirates on their Net Neutrality campaign?

 

Hi Thomas,

 

Passing this on.  Would any German Pirates want to help?  Please forward to other European pirate party contacts you know.  

 

Thanks!

 

James

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joseph P. Thornton III <joethorntoniii AT gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 4:48 PM
Subject: Working on an EU Net Neutrality project, and would like to involve EU Pirates
To: James O'Keefe <jokeefe AT jamesokeefe.org>

Hey James,

 

Right now at Fight for the Future, we are preparing to launch a campaign for Net Neutrality in the EU on June 28th. I was hoping you might be able to get me in touch with any Pirates throughout the EU who would be interested in lending support and spreading the word. I think it would be really effective if we all organised around this. I pasted our outreach email for you to check out.

 

Thanks,

Joe

 

 

---

 

Hey,

 

We just secured US net neutrality rules with a strong court decision this week! We couldn’t have done it without millions in our community, like you.

 

Joe Thornton with Fight for the Future here, we organized the massive actions that won Net Neutrality in the US, and now we’re launching the EU Slowdown on June 28th. This is an Internet-wide action to make sure as many concerned Internet users as possible send in strong comments to EU regulators to protect the open Intrenet before their deadline closes. Preview here:  SaveNetNeutrality.eu

 

If we don’t get enough comments in, the EU could end up with rules that allow throttling of a whole class of application / protocol and/or sites who aren’t part of sponsored data plans. Lax EU net neutrality guidelines could soon let ISPs effectively slow your content for users in the EU.

 

Would you all be able to participate in helping gather comments? This could happen either in a big push on the day of, or in an ongoing way from now until the comment deadline on July 18th. Mozilla has been gathering comments from their start page as of yesterday, so we’re off to a good start.

`

If you can help announce now, here’s sample tweets: 

 

We won #NetNeutrality in the US. Now, let’s win it in Europe too. Join the EU Slowdown on June 28th: savenetneutrality.eu

 

The EU could soon let ISPs slow your Internet. Don’t let that happen, join the #EUSlowdown. savenetneutrality.eu

 

I added more below on the what’s happening — would you want to be involved at all? Let us know so we can add your logo to the site.

 

 

— Joe

fightforthefuture.org

 

######

 

This summer, we have a *huge* opportunity. We can win real Net Neutrality in one of the world’s most important regions: Europe. Or we can lose it and classes of applications would be throttled. 

 

European regulators finalize their guidelines by the end of August. They’ve published a draft, and there are some really bad loopholes. If we fix these, and repel telco attempts to worsen the draft, we win. But if we can’t, that will undermine our work in the US and globally. And it will let EU ISPs manipulate the choices of every internet user in the world’s largest economy… which would do global harm to the open internet. 

 

The public debate happens in June and early July—mostly June, thanks to long European vacations—and a public consultation ends July 18. In the US and India, massive numbers of public comments (and a media firestorm) were crucial to swaying regulators. So we’re organizing a day of action onJune 28, in which sites and influential people join together to raise awareness and drive comments to EU regulators. 

 

The two things we need to know are:

 

1 Are you or your organization interested in participating to help drive comments, by adding a widget with the slow loading icon to your site, or contacting your networks? Join here: savenetneutrality.eu

2 Is there anyone in your network, especially in Europe, who could help us reach influential people, popular sites, and large audiences?

 

Please let us know. This is just an update, and I’ll be sending more, with more specific asks. If you’d prefer to not receive these, please let me know. 

 

Here are the loopholes we need to fix. This summarizes Thomas Lohninger’s analysis of the draft text.

 

1 Zero-rating questions handled on a case-by-case basis. This has put us in a dangerous position here in the US, and makes even less sense in Europe, where each country could make wildly different determinations of what’s okay, and where ISPs are already abusing zero-rating (the practice of subsidizing some sites while charging more for others).

2 “Traffic management” that allows lazy (or evil) throttling of entire traffic types. ISPs will be free to throttle any class of traffic. VOIP. VPN. P2P. Blockchain networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. IPFS. Minecraft. Videochat. TOR. All of these are at risk, not to mention all the awesome futuristic things people will dream up to augment or surpass the web. It’s easy to imagine throttling for anti-competitive reasons, too, such as a mobile ISP that throttles VOIP.

3 Slowlanes when using “specialized services”. The draft has a strict (good!) definition of specialized services. But it allows those services to eat into the user's’ allotted bandwidth, slowing their normal internet (bad!) People’s regular Internet should be unaffected by whatever these specialized services turn out to be, and as an extra guarantee that this won’t become a loophole.

 

Many of you saw how we won in the US, by driving millions of comments to the FCC, paired with strong legal arguments, from diverse and persuasive messengers. That’s how they won in India too. Now we need to make that same confluence of factors happen in Europe, on a pretty short timeline.

 

So far, the number of comments submitted to BEREC is in the low thousands. This sounds simple, but it is critical: we need to add some zeroes to that number. 

 

Let us know if you’d like to help, and if you have any other contacts who you think could be especially helpful in any EU country.

 

--

Joseph P. Thornton III

+ Joethorntoniii AT gmail.com

+ 1 781 910 4934

+ 64 1/2 Day St. #2

   Boston, MA 02130

 

 

 

--

peace,

James
--
James O'Keefe

Captain, Massachusetts Pirate Party / masspirates.org
Vice Chair, United States Pirate Party / uspirates.org

w: jamesokeefe.org  e: jokeefe AT jamesokeefe.org  m: 617-447-0210

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