We Fight Today, For a Better Tomorrow

[Commentary] Jan 20 marks the official commemoration of what would have been Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s 85th birthday. So naturally, as I listened to Dr King’s words for the umpteenth time in my life, I thought about the open Internet work that has consumed all of my waking (and sleeping) time these past few days, ever since the DC Circuit court handed down its ruling tossing out the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet rules. And I thought about it not in terms of what I’m working for today, but what the world will be like when my two daughters are grown.

Social justice activists today have social media, blogs, e-mail, video chats and other organizing tools to rally support, and these tools are all there because of the open Internet. Watching the footage of the massive crowd gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, I imagined that given the relatively short period of time that Bayard Rustin had to manage the logistics of this unprecedented event, he probably spent a lot of time using the phone. I recalled how instrumental “WATS” phone services (predecessor to 1-800 long distance lines) were to the Freedom Movement organizers as they evaded attempts by local law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan to shut them down or kill them. And I wondered: If the phone network was not a common carriage platform, required to be open and non-discriminatory to all, would Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph and Dr King have been successful mobilizing the masses for that historic event? Would the Freedom Movement have been destroyed completely? I’m glad I don’t need to worry about those “what ifs,” because the network was open. And it helped create a better future. The fight for an open Internet that we wage at Free Press is not about today -- it’s about the future. Like many big public policy debates, it’s about the world we want to leave for future generations. In a world where the owners of the network get to decide what speech flows over the network, will those organizing against injustices that the broader society and powers that be find acceptable even be possible?