For one day, tech companies big and small united on a common cause: to protest the government’s rollback of rules for the internet.
Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and hundreds of smaller tech companies coordinated a huge online protest on Wednesday against the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to scrap net neutrality rules, which guarantee that broadband service providers treat all internet traffic equally. The tech companies want the rules to remain to protect them from unfair treatment by broadband providers like Comcast or AT&T, which could create faster delivery lanes for some websites and not others.
Silicon Valley approached this fight against the Trump administration’s plans its own way — by taking to the internet.
Some of the biggest users of internet lanes were at the forefront. Netflix, which depends on free and open internet lanes to transmit its streaming video, had a small banner ad on its home page reading “Protect Internet Freedom. Defend Net Neutrality. Take Action,” which linked to the net neutrality information page of its trade group, the Internet Association. (The banner didn’t appear on the app for television viewers.)
