Internet Slowdown Protests Drove Over 300,000 Calls & 2 Million Emails To Congress, Plus Another 700,000 FCC Comments

from the but-still-some-want-to-dismiss-it dept

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In discussing yesterday's internet slowdown day protest, we noted that, at its peak, the effort was driving over 1,000 calls per minute to Congress. The final numbers are now in , and they're amazing.If you can't see the image, it shows 303,099 calls made to Congress, 2,167,092 emails sent to Congress, and another 722,364 comments filed with the FCC. If you want to file comments with the FCC (you can read ours, if you'd like a sample ) I recommend using EFF's DearFCC.org website.What's amazing is how quick some folks have been to try to dismiss thissuccessful effort. The most hilarious of all has to be Newsweek (the same publication that recently outed the wrong Satoshi Nakamoto as the "creator" of Bitcoin), whose Lauren Walker seemed so anxious to slam the protests as meaningless that she wrote a hilariously wrong article suggesting no one really participated in the protests, and that even the activists are conceding that net neutrality is dead.Walker uses the weak premise that so many cynical tech press folks have used in the past few years: if an online protest doesn't match the astounding numbers from the giant anti-SOPA/PIPA internet "blackout," then clearly it's a failure. That's a dumb hacky premise, but hacky reporters keep jumping on it. Even worse, however, is that (beyond misquoting Fight for the Future's Evan Greer), Walker insists that the protest fizzled because very few sites took part, and those that did probably didn't drive anyone to do anything. She reports none of the numbers above, and totally incorrectly claims that just 76 websites participated. The number was actually more than 10,000. Reporting!Either way, the effort yesterday has to be seen as a huge success in driving awareness on the issue andin letting DC know that the public really cares about this issue. And, now, we wait to see if the FCC will actually listen to those pleas.

Filed Under: calls, congress, fcc, internet slowdown day, net neutrality, open internet, protests