Trump Is About to Find Out What Happens When You Mess With the Open Internet

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, met on April 4 with broadband industry officials to discuss how best to dismantle the legal basis underpinning the FCC's 2015 Open Internet net neutrality policy. "If the FCC's Open Internet rules are directly jeopardized—either by the Trump administration and the FCC, or by Republicans and Democrats in Congress—we will work with our allies to mobilize on a mass scale," said Mark Stanley, a senior official at the progressive organizing group Demand Progress.

The inside-the-Beltway mechanics of how precisely Chairman Pai and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill plan to dismantle the FCC's net neutrality policy are already the subject of DC parlor games. But the procedural details should not obscure the core net neutrality principles at stake: Online innovation, civic empowerment, individual privacy, and free speech. It's these principles that net neutrality activists across the country are now mobilizing to defend. "It took a decade to win the fight for net neutrality, and people will not sit by silently when politicians threaten to take it away," said Craig Aaron, President and CEO of DC-based public interest group Free Press. "They will defend the open internet and the free expression, economic innovation and popular organizing it makes possible. The system may be rigged in favor of corporate giants, but Donald Trump is about to find out the hard way what happens when you mess with the internet."