Petition to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts:
Your company’s efforts to shut down comcastroturf.com are a perfect example of why Americans don’t trust Comcast with the power to censor viewpoints online. Strong Title II net neutrality protects our free speech online, so it is doubly outrageous that you would try to use your legal and financial resources to silence supporters of net neutrality rather than engage in honest debate. Please immediately abandon your attempts to censor and silence pro-net neutrality activists.
Comcast just proved why we need strong Title II net neutrality. The cable behemoth sent a cease-and-desist letter to our friends at Fight for the Future,1 for their efforts to save net neutrality and fight back against Big Cable trickery.
Attempts to silence the speech of net neutrality activists prove there is no way we can trust Comcast and Big Cable to protect our freedom of expression online.
Tell Comcast: Stop trying to censor the speech of net neutrality activists!
You may have heard about the hundreds of thousands of fake anti-net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC by bots using stolen names.2 Many observers and net neutrality activists believe these fake comments are part of an astroturf campaign potentially funded by the Cable lobby.
Our friends at Fight for the Future created this handy website, comcastroturf.com, so people can check if fake comments were submitted under their name. Just days after it went live, Comcast sent Fight for the Future a cease-and-desist letter, claiming the site violated Comcast’s “valuable intellectual property,” due to the “confusingly similar” domain name of the site.
That’s right. Comcast and Big Cable know they can’t win a fair fight against activists like you, so they’re using their high-powered lawyers to play dirty.
This is exactly why we need net neutrality. If strong Title II net neutrality rules were not in place today, Comcast could unilaterally block or slow down traffic to comcastroturf.com, demandprogress.org, or any site they disagree with or that refuses to pay them money.
Stand up for free speech online. Tell Comcast to stop trying to silence pro-net neutrality activists.
Sources:
1. Fight for the Future, “Comcast tries to censor pro-net neutrality website calling for investigation of fake FCC comments potentially funded by cable lobby,” May 23, 2017.
2. Fortune, “Turns Out Almost All Non-Spam Net Neutrality Comments Support Rules,” May 15, 2017.