How to Convince 50,000 Internet Trolls to Crash a Government Website Markham Nolan - Vocative
go to original June 11, 2014

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): Net Neutrality (Last Week Tonight)

For the last year, geeks around the world have tried desperately to get the public to care about net neutrality, a looming crisis that could potentially create huge inequality on the Internet. Unfortunately, the topic is as boring as it is important, which is why we’ve all pretty much ignored it. But HBO satirist and Daily Show alum John Oliver took a defibrillator to the flatlined story this weekend and gave it a pulse, convincing an army of jaded Internet trolls to actually get involved and do something about it.

At the heart of the issue are telecom giants like Comcast and Verizon, who want a two-tier Internet that will allow big companies to pay extra for their content to move along faster channels, essentially creating a new Internet with a moneyed elite whizzing along at the top—and everyone else trundling along at the bottom.

The segment on Sunday night’s Last Week Tonight poked fun at the obvious conflict of interest of a former telecom company lobbyist being appointed by President Obama to a body that is supposed to oversee telecom companies. But most importantly, it also managed to explain net neutrality in human terms for the first time, demonstrating in a breezy 12 minutes why everyone should be up in arms about it.

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