2011 saw the launch of petitions.whitehouse.gov-- a website dedicated to making petitions that, if they reach a certain threshold, the petition will be formally responded to by the White House. Keeping their word, in 2013, a petition regarding building a Death Star surpassed the threshold and the White House, as expected, addressed it.
The 100,000 signature threshold was passed in a recent petition to prevent ISPs from violating net neutrality, and there has already been a formal pledge for support from the President's Chief Technology Officer, Todd Park. Net Neutrality involves preventing ISP's from charging certain websites, usually bandwidth-heavy websites such as Netflix, Hulu or Youtube, in order to stream their content at full speed. Without net neutrality, ISP's can offer different websites at different speeds which could not only cause significant issues for the end-user, but would also stifle innovation from new companies that are unable to cover the additional costs that are demanded by the ISP's. It may also mean that some websites could pay for preferential service over their competitor, which would unfairly affect how people visit certain websites-- it could grow the userbase of corporate-backed websites, and destroy the userbase of independent websites.
Luckily, Park is in support of net neutrality, and his post specified that "Preserving an open Internet is vital not to just to the free flow of information, but also to promoting innovation and economic productivity."
Just a few weeks ago the internet community experienced a major shake-up after a court case invalidated the FCC's ruling on net neutrality, which had a tremendous effect on many companies, most notably Netflix.
"Absent net neutrality, the Internet could turn into a high-priced private toll road that would be inaccessible to the next generation of visionaries" - Park
Not all companies will be happy about this, however. Verizon was so anxious to throw in their legal team to try to invalidate net neutrality laws such that one case was thrown out of court because the laws hadn't yet even entered the national register.
Source: Techcrunch | Check out Park's entire post here.
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