This article could not come at a more timely moment. As many are in despair because of the impending Net Neutrality rollback, we know that there is hope even if we are immediately unsuccessful in staving it off.
There are many ways to skin a cat. The attack on Net Neutrality may awaken Americans to take control of more than the internet in the long run.
Sammi-Jo Lee writes in her article titled “How Internet Co-ops Can Protect Us From Net Neutrality Rollbacks” the following.
These locally owned networks are poised to do what federal and state governments and the marketplace couldn’t. One, they can bring affordable access to fast internet to anyone, narrowing the digital divide that deepens individual and regional socioeconomic disparities.
Two, these small operators can protect open internet access from the handful of large ISPs that stand to pocket the profits from net neutrality rollbacks that the Trump administration announced Nov. 21. That’s according to Christopher Mitchell, who is the director of Community Broadband Projects, a project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Mitchell, who has been tracking and advocating community-owned broadband networks for a decade, hopes that this will be the moment when people rebel against the administration’s attack on net neutrality and expand rural cooperative and municipal ISPs.
“The FCC is basically taking the regulations off of big companies, but local companies can still offer high-quality internet access at good prices,” Mitchell says.
Establishment of local co-ops for services and products after an unbearable encroachment by government empowered corporations may just be the bill to start a significant change in our economy. The Plutocracy better look out. They may add gasoline to a burgeoning movement.
I cover a lot of these issues in my book “As I See It: Class Warfare the Only Resort to Right Wing Doom.” Political economist and historian, Dr. Gar Alperovitz, covers solutions to several of these issues in his books “America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy” and “The Next American Revolution: Beyond Corporate Capitalism & State Socialism.” I interviewed Dr. Gar Alperovitz a few years ago where he laid out the migration from the undemocratic corporation to cooperatives and collectives where workers partake of the profits they created as opposed to the spoils going to the few as unearned income.