Archive - June 25th, 2017

Tumblr is now owned by a phone company, so it’s stopped fighting for Network Neutrality

June 25 Comments Off on Tumblr is now owned by a phone company, so it’s stopped fighting for Network Neutrality Category: Feed, Tumblr

mostlysignssomeportents:

Yahoo’s sale to Verizon means that Yahoo’s sub-companies – Flickr, Tumblr and a host of others – are now divisions of a phone company, and as you might expect, being on the payroll of a notorious neutracidal maniac with a long history of sleazy, invasive, privacy-destroying, monopolistic, deceptive, anti-competitive, scumbag shakedowns has changed the public positions these companies are allowed to take.

This matters a lot. The previous fights for net neutrality were won in part with the support of scrappy online companies like Tumblr, whose CEO, staff and users worked together to send a strong message to Congress and the FCC about the importance of a neutral internet, free from ISPs who slow down your connections to services unless they pay bribes for “premium” carriage.

With Trump’s FCC set to slay Net Neutality, the internet is once again planning a day of coordinated action: on July 12, sites across the net will send their users to the FCC and Congress to demand that ISPs be held to a public service standard befitting the trillions of dollars in public subsidies they receive every year in the form of access to rights of way through our cities and between them.

However, Tumblr is not among the companies presently slated to participate, and sources within the company told The Verge that the company and its CEO, David Karp (once a staunch Net Neutrality campaigner) have been given orders to sit this one out.

https://boingboing.net/2017/06/22/corporations-arent-people.html