ONA Issues

A submission from Will Sullivan, Director of Mobile News for Lee and ONA board member. 

Interesting new project defending the internet from one of the founders of Reddit. Here’s more info from The Verge:

Earlier this year a number of high-profile websites went dark as a form of digital protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA was eventually scuttled, but its not the only internet-related legislation on the horizon, and a group calling itself the Internet Defense League is putting into place a system that could rally thousands of sites for similar protest at a moment’s notice. Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and Fight for the Future have partnered to create the initiative, which will send participants code they can implement on their own websites to allow them to participate in future online protests on the fly. Signing up for the service now provides users with test code to ensure their site will work properly with future campaigns — new code will be sent out as needed — but the IDL is also working on a system that can lie dormant within a participant’s site, and be automatically activated when a new campaign starts (within certain parameters set by the site owner). The code will also generate tracking information, allowing the IDL to note how many individuals are actually seeing the various protest campaigns. The system will work with almost any sort of internet presence, from websites and Tumblr blogs, to YouTube channels and Twitter pages.

Four months after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) supposedly settled the issue, the battle over Net Neutrality is still raging. If anything, it’s just beginning to heat up.  On April 8, the Republican-controlled Congress resolved to repeal the FCC’s recent legislation surrounding Internet protections, and conservative activists are fighting tooth and nail to push back any apparent gains before they are realized. At the same time, media reform advocates say that the FCC’s December ruling on broadband policy did not go far enough in establishing consumer-friendly regulatory guidelines across both Internet and mobile platforms.

Meanwhile, the impact of the announced merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is still up for debate, and federal officials are raising anti-trust concerns against Google.

See more at The Wavelength, a bi-weekly blog on media policy from The Media Consortium.