Neo-Nazis Think Killing Net Neutrality Will Be Good For Them
Image by Getty Images
By Ari Feldman November 29, 2017
Neo-Nazis think that the current government proposal to end net neutrality, sometimes called the “First Amendment of the internet,” will be to their benefit.
Net neutrality means that web service providers like Comcast or Time Warner must treat and charge all websites the same regardless of content. The Federal Communications Commission is weighing whether to end that mandate.
Many prominent websites devoted to Nazi ideology and white supremacy have gone dark over the past year. Their domain providers have removed sites like the Daily Stormer from the internet, forcing them to go on the so-called “dark web.” Some neo-Nazis, like the Daily Stormer’s founder Andrew Anglin, believe that killing net neutrality laws would help put their sites back online.
“It will be a transformative thing, and it will unleash a plague of frogs on Twitter at full force again,” Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. “The cavalry is coming, my friends, and it is coming to do something about these kikes.”
Andrew Auernheimer, a prominent neo-Nazi hacker, posted a YouTube video also criticizing net neutrality, saying that it helps maintain the telecom companies’ monopolies. “Businesses should be allowed to run their business how they please, and the Jewish-run FCC should not have the right to muscle them out of business with tyrannical policies,” he wrote in 2010.
Experts believe that this view is misguided.
“If the alt-right movement thinks doing away with net neutrality laws will help them stay online, they are in for a big surprise,” Ryan Singel, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School in California, told Newsweek.
Repealing net neutrality will make it easier for corporations to resist hosting racist or anti-Semitic content, he said: “The exact opposite thing of what these people want is what they’re going to get.”
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
