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For Immediate Release
March, 10 2021, 11:00pm EDT
Contact:
Mark Stanley, press@demandprogress.org
Caitlin Seeley George, press@fightforthefuture.org
Groups Call on Biden to Appoint a Champ to the FCC to Reinstate Net Neutrality and Get People Internet Access
Net neutrality activists relaunch Battle for the Net, demanding the Biden administration end the revolving door at the FCC and restore the open Internet.
WASHINGTON
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, affordable and reliable Internet access has never been more important. Many people are still working from home, children are still learning online, and people looking for information about where and when to get a vaccine often require the Internet. But nearly 80 million people in the U.S. still do not have adequate broadband at home--with poor families and people of color disproportionately disconnected.
More than 20 organizations are joining forces to call on the Biden administration to address this ongoing issue. Battle for the Net has long been the grassroots hub for information and action regarding net neutrality. Now, Fight for the Future and Demand Progress are working with a coalition of digital and civil rights organizations to re-focus this fight by demanding the Biden administration appoint a fifth commissioner with no telecom industry ties to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
"Americans desperately need a return to an FCC that is an empowered advocate for the public, not the telecom industry," said Mark Stanley, director of operations for Demand Progress. "The Biden administration has a historic opportunity to close the digital divide for millions, ensure net neutrality, and protect consumers against ISP abuses. It is no longer a question of whether broadband internet access is an essential service. It is, and it is critical that Biden's nominee is someone who embraces this reality and supports Title II classification for broadband."
"The Biden Administration has said getting people online during the pandemic is a top priority, and if that's the case we need a real champ appointed to the FCC, ASAP--someone who isn't beholden to big telecom companies because they used to work for them. The last thing we need is some Democratic version of Ajit Pai," said Caitlin Seeley George (she/her), director of campaigns and operations at Fight for the Future. "A fully functional FCC will be able to ensure kids can keep learning without being forced to sit outside fast food restaurants, it will be able to start the process of reinstating net neutrality, and it will be able to stop greedy ISPs from imposing data caps and kicking people offline."
While the Biden administration has yet to announce a candidate for the fifth commissioner position, some of the names being floated include candidates with ties to the telecom industry. This is a major concern for the groups on Battle for the Net -- they highlight that the seat should not be filled by anyone with media or telecom industry history, to ensure they prioritise fighting for people instead of industry. The groups also highlight that it is critical the fifth commissioner supports the Title II classification for broadband access that was repealed by the Trump FCC, which was chaired by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai. Critically, Title II classification provides the necessary legal authority for the FCC to ensure net neutrality and network reliability, expand affordability, and protect consumers against ISP abuses, including unfair data caps.
In the past, BattleForTheNet.com has hosted campaigns that have resulted in millions of actions in support of net neutrality, thousands of calls to legislators to pass the Save the Internet Act, and helped organize websites and companies around events like the historic 2014 Internet Slowdown Day of Action -- one of the biggest days of online activism ever.
Organizations participating in the current action to push the Biden administration to appoint an open Internet champion as the fifth commissioner to the FCC include:
- Fight for the Future
- Demand Progress
- Free Press Action
- American Family Voices
- California Clean Money Action Fund
- Center for Popular Democracy Action
- Common Cause
- Daily Kos
- Friends of the Earth Action
- MediaJustice
- OpenMedia
- Other98
- People For the American Way
- Presente Action
- Progress America
- Public Citizen
- RootsAction.org
- Social Security Works
- The Nation
- The Zero Hour
- United Church of Christ, OC Inc.
- Watchdog.net
- Win Without War
Demand Progress amplifies the voice of the people -- and wields it to make government accountable and contest concentrated corporate power. Our mission is to protect the democratic character of the internet -- and wield it to contest concentrated corporate power and hold government accountable.
LATEST NEWS
Georgia Fires Entire Maternal Mortality Panel After Reporting on Abortion Ban Deaths
"This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm," said one journalist. "Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."
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Georgia officials fired everyone on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee after ProPublicareported that the panel found the deaths of two women whose care was restricted by the state's abortion ban were preventable, the news outlet revealed Thursday.
ProPublica first exposed the committee's findings for Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in September, sparking a flood of criticism directed at abortion care restrictions and the primarily Republican politicians who impose them. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running for the White House, even traveled to Atlanta to pay tribute to the two women.
"They didn't like that reporters found out that the state's ban killed two women."
Thurman and Miller's stories, as the news outlet acknowledged Thursday, "became a central discussion" in not only the presidential contest—ultimately won by Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has bragged about the role he played in reversing Roe v. Wade—but also ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in 10 states, seven of which succeeded.
In a November 8 letter obtained by ProPublica, Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey wrote that an "investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information" despite state law and confidential agreements signed by panel members barring such disclosures.
Toomey explained that the committee was immediately "disbanded," a replacement panel will be formed through a new application process, and additional procedures are under consideration regarding confidentiality, oversight, and organizational structure.
ProPublica reported that the office of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp—who appointed Toomey—declined to comment and referred questions to the health department, whose spokesperson also declined to comment, saying that the letter, "speaks for itself."
As the outlet detailed:
Reproductive rights advocates say Georgia's decision to dismiss and restructure its committee also could have a chilling effect on the committee's work, potentially dissuading its members from delving as deeply as they have into the circumstances of pregnant women's deaths if it could be politically sensitive.
"They did what they were supposed to do. This is why we need them," said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the groups challenging Georgia's abortion ban in court. "To have this abrupt disbandment, my concern is what we are going to lose in the process, in terms of time and data?"
Other reproductive rights advocates and journalists were similarly critical in response to the new reporting from ProPublica—which has also covered the deaths of two women in Texas: Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain.
"Women died because they received no life-saving care as they were having miscarriages in Georgia and the state responded by simply eradicating the committee that investigated deaths of pregnant women," declared writer and organizer Hannah Riley.
The National Institute for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group, asserted that "when anti-abortion politicians find FACTS inconvenient, they dismantle the systems meant to hold them accountable."
New York magazine senior correspondent Irin Carmon, whose forthcoming book is about pregnancy in the United States, similarly said: "This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm. Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."
Jessica Valenti, author of the newsletterAbortion, Every Day and the bookAbortion, also argued that Georgia officials fired the panel members because "they didn't like that reporters found out that the state's ban killed two women."
"I wrote about this in my book—this is how they cover up our deaths," Valenti continued. "In Idaho, they disbanded the Maternal Mortality Review Committee altogether; in Texas, they put a well-known anti-abortion activist on there to skew the data."
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The Brazilian Federal Police on Thursday indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 others for allegedly plotting the "violent overthrow of the democratic state" after the country's current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, defeated the right-wing leader in 2022.
"The final report has been sent to the Supreme Court with the request that 37 individuals be indicted for the crimes of the violent overthrow of the democratic state, coup d' etat, and criminal organization," police said in a statement about the conclusion of the two-year investigation.
As The New York Timesexplained: "Although the police in Brazil can make recommendations about criminal prosecutions, they do not have the power to formally charge Mr. Bolsonaro. The country's top federal prosecutor, Paulo Gonet, must now... decide whether to pursue charges against Mr. Bolsonaro and compel him to stand trial before the nation's Supreme Court."
The recommendations for charges came after the arrest of four members of the military and a federal police officer earlier this week over an alleged plot to kill Lula and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin before they were sworn in, as well as Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Police said that "a detailed operational plan called 'Green and Yellow Dagger' was identified, which would be executed on December 15, 2022, aimed at the murder of the elected candidates for president and vice president."
According toCNN, "Police reportedly allege that Bolsonaro had 'full knowledge' of a plan to prevent Lula and his government from taking office after his election victory."
Summarizing a conversation with a columnist, Bolsonaro said on social media Thursday that "we have to see what is in this indictment by the Federal Police. I will wait for the lawyer." He also said that Moraes "does everything that the law does not say" and "I cannot expect anything from a team that uses creativity to denounce me."
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, including with two other pending cases: In March he was indicted for allegedly falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination data and in July he was indicted for crimes including embezzlement related to alleged misappropriation of diamond jewelry and other state property. Those indictments came after Brazil's highest election authority last year barred him from running for any public office for eight years over his lies about the 2022 contest.
In addition to Bolsonaro, the other three dozen people indicted on Thursday include "some of the most important members of his far-right administration," The Guardianreported. As the newspaper detailed:
They included Bolsonaro's former spy chief, the far-right Congressman Alexandre Ramagem; the former defense ministers, Gen. Walter Braga Netto and Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; the former minister of justice and public security, Anderson Torres; the former minister of institutional security, Gen. Augusto Heleno; the former navy commander Adm. Almir Garnier Santos; the president of Bolsonaro's political party, Valdemar Costa Neto; and Filipe Martins, one of Bolsonaro's top foreign policy advisers.
Also named is the right-wing blogger grandson of Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo, one of the military rulers who governed Brazil during its 1964-85 dictatorship.
The list contains one non-Brazilian name: that of Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian digital marketing guru who was in charge of communications for Argentina's president, Javier Milei, during that country's 2023 presidential campaign. Buenos Aires-based Cerimedo is close to Bolsonaro and his politician sons.
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Bolsonaro was among the right-wing leaders around the world who celebrated U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's victory earlier this month. The Brazilian—who is sometimes called the "Trump of the Tropics" and like the American incited an insurrection after his last electoral loss—said that the impact of Trump's win "will resonate across the globe... empowering the rise of the right and conservative movements in countless other nations."
Trump's return to office is expected to at least stall if not end his various legal issues, including for trying to overturn his 2020 loss.
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As the clock winds down at the UN climate summit taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, green groups are sounding the alarm Thursday following the release of a draft climate finance deal that they say falls short of what's needed to support climate-vulnerable countries and adequately address the planetary crisis.
"The clock is ticking. COP29 is now down to the wire," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday, just a day before the two-week conference is set to conclude.
Finance has been a major focus of this year's summit. Under the 20125 Paris Agreement, countries are supposed to come up with a "new collective quantified goal"—or NCQG in COP jargon—that will govern how much money from rich countries will be transferred to developing countries in order to help the latter cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.
No equivalent climate finance arrangement has been agreed to before, though countries at the summit broadly agree that richer countries, who are responsible for much of historic CO2 emissions, should help poorer and more climate-vulnerable nations deal with natural disasters and their transition to green energy.
The draft text that dropped early Thursday, however, was received poorly.
Oxfam International's climate justice lead, Safa’ Al Jayoussi, said "COP29 must do more than simply repeat the same threadbare promises. Rich countries have spent decades now stalling and blocking genuine progress on climate finance. This has left the Global South suffering the most catastrophic consequences of a climate crisis they did not create. The draft text scandalously misses the crucial element of declaring a clear public commitment to a new climate finance goal."
Instead of specifying how much annually should be funneled towards developing countries via climate finance, the NCQG draft text displayed "X" in place of any actual figures or monetary commitments.
Oscar Soria, a director at the Common Initiative think tank, told the Guardian: "The negotiating placeholder 'X' for climate finance is a testament of the ineptitude from rich nations and emerging economies that are failing to find a workable solution for everyone."
"By the end of the UN climate talks, we must see at least a trillion dollars in public finance on the table," added Andreas Sieber, 350.org associate director of policy and campaigns. Economists told the summit attendees last week that developing countries need at least $1 trillion annually by 2030 to deal with climate change.
A specific and shared concern from campaigners was the draft text's inclusion of carbon market schemes as a way "to scale up" climate finance. While the draft promotes "high-integrity voluntary carbon markets" and other "instruments that mobilize new sources of climate finance and private finance" as part of the equation, critics have long warned that these market-based approaches are nothing but false solutions designed to benefit corporate investors, wealthier nations, and the fossil fuel industry itself.
"Labelling carbon credits as climate finance—which they are unreservedly not—should be axed from the text or risk creating a dangerous escape route for polluters. The same goes for explicitly allowing investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. This is fundamentally incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement," said Laurie van der Burg, Oil Change International's global public finance manager, in response to the draft text.
While Article 6 of the Paris Agreement allows for the international transfer of carbon credits, groups warned the changes in the COP29 draft would dramatically strengthen the foothold of such schemes.
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Without addressing these concerns, advocates of a meaningful deal at the conference say COP29 is headed for failure.
As 350.org's Sieber argued, paying the "historic debt that rich countries owe will enable all nations to take action on climate at home and meet the collective goal agreed last year at COP28—to triple renewable energy, and transition away from fossil fuels. Right now, we only see cowardice and a void in leadership, ignoring the undeniable science that we can't keep polluting our planet with dirty oil, gas and coal."
"The time to course correct is now—the European Union and other rich countries must stop playing poker with the planet and humankind's future at stake," Sieber added. "It's time to put their cards on the table and commit real, transformative funding—no more excuses, no more delays, it's time."
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