Free Press is promising hundreds of protestors will gather at the FCC's Washington headquarters May 15 to protest the new FCC open internet rules FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is planning to vote on.
They would be joining the handful of protestors who have been camped outside the building since last week calling for the chairman to classify Internet access as a Title II service rather than try to restore the rules using existing authority to promote advanced telecommunications services. Free Press is pushing for Title II, too.
“Chairman Wheeler is feeling the grassroots pressure against his pay-for-prioritization proposal. But he still isn’t giving Internet users the Net Neutrality protections they demand,” said Free Press president Craig Aaron in announcing the protest.
Free Press is also trying to drum up support, and money, for what it is billing as "The Rally to Save the Internet" at www.savetheinternet.com.
The protest is scheduled to start at 9 a.m.—the meeting is scheduled for 10:30 a.m.—and protestors are being urged to bring pots, pans or whatever else they can bang together to "dance, drum and shout that the agency must throw out its destructive plan and reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service."
Wheeler has said repeatedly that the new draft rules will not tolerate Internet fast and slow lanes, and that the case-by-case approach it takes is a legally sustainable way to insure that.
