این فصل را با ذکر تمام تیترهایش(تاکید میکنم ذکر تمام تیترهایش) به انگلیسی روان خلاصه شود   CHAPTER SEVEN 

Internet Freedom from the Outside In
CRAIG AAR ON and TI m O THY KARR, Free Press, United States




MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
Progress on any important issue will be impossible without changes to the policies, laws, and politics that created the media we have now. The only way to make such changes is by creating a broad, popular movement for media reform. To mobilize this movement, Free Press uses an outside-in approach. For its net neutrality cam- paign, which culminated with a historic victory at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in February 2015, Free Press mobilized hundreds of organiza- tional allies and millions of “outside” activists to sign petitions, call Congress, and attend FCC hearings and local rallies. Free Press combined its robust ﬁeld strategy with “inside” expertise—including a Washington-based team of lawyers and lob- byists—to compel policy-makers to side with the public interest. Whether working for Internet freedom in the United States or abroad, advocates won’t win the right policies without a symbiosis of ﬁeldwork and policy intelligence. While the ﬁght for net neutrality is far from over, the best long-term strategy for saving the Inter- net will be to work from the outside in.

On a cold Thursday morning in January 2014, a small group of advocates gath- ered outside the imposing ediﬁce of the FCC in Washington, DC. They opened the trunk of a red Ford Fusion parked nearby and began unloading about twenty white banker’s boxes. Within minutes, they had assembled a makeshift cardboard podium. Inside the boxes were more than a million signatures col- lected in just two weeks from people across the country.

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Each person had signed on to an online letter demanding the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler protect net neutrality, the principle that ensures that the Internet remains open and free from discrimination by the large phone and cable com- panies that control broadband access for most Americans.
These petition deliveries were just the beginning of a year of Internet activ- ism that resulted in unprecedented public involvement in an issue before the FCC, unexpected popular attention on the once obscure issue of net neutrality, and a remarkable reversal that would eventually lead both the president of the United States and the chairman of the FCC to endorse the strongest public interest protections.
Net neutrality as an idea is but one part of a larger global movement of people ﬁghting for Internet freedom. It is a movement that includes democracy activists in Eastern Europe, Arab Spring protesters in the Middle East and North Africa, and dissident bloggers and “hacktivists” across Asia. In early 2012, more than ten million people mobilized online and oﬀ to defeat the SOPA/PIPA Web censorship legislation in the United States (Lee 2012). Activ- ists are using the open Internet to ﬁght unchecked spying and surveillance by the NSA and demand online privacy and free speech rights.
The Internet was designed to be an engine of disintermediation, free speech, and inclusion—a means by which anyone could route around the gatekeepers, build online communities, and share information. It opened the door for new forms of grassroots political organizing and gave smart online activists an impressive means to inﬂuence policies and shame bad actors.
With only a tiny fraction of ﬁnancial resources of our opponents, Internet freedom advocates struggle every day to preserve this openness. In response to the Internet freedom movement’s successes, industry has hired a phalanx of front groups to paint activists as extremists and doomsayers (Gustin 2010; Powell 2014). The fate of the Internet is best left in the hands of “experts,” they say, those think-tank analysts who are themselves often on the dole of powerful cable and telephone companies (Ekran 2014). 
For their part, the empires of companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable were built not on innovation, free speech, and inclu- sion, but on control of markets and squelching new competition. Despite what their PR oﬃces would like us to believe, their armies of lobbyists earn their keep by winning anticompetitive legislation and exclusive government franchises while stiﬂing the entry of new applications and services on their networks.
And it’s quite an army. The three largest Internet service providers—Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast—have spent more than $500 million dollars on lobbyists and an additional $185 million in campaign contributions over the past twenty- ﬁve years.  This corporate largesse has delivered a return on investment. The past three decades of media policymaking is a story of growing consolidation of media power into the hands of a very few.
 
Essential to their success is the corruption of the political process and an ever-revolving door between the regulators and the regulated. Of the twenty- six FCC commissioners and chairs to have served at the agency between 1980 and the end of 2012, at least twenty-one have gone on to work—as an employee, consultant, lobbyist, lawyer, or paid board member—for corpora- tions in industries they were in oﬃce to regulate. Michael Powell who served as FCC chairman from 2001 until 2005 is now the top lobbyist for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. In 2011, Meredith Atwell Baker left her job as FCC commissioner for a top lobbying position at Comcast. She announced her transition just four months after voting to approve the cable giant’s takeover of NBC (Stearns 2011).
This is the challenge facing any Internet freedom ﬁghter. While we are far from pinning down this many-tentacled beast, we believe that outside-in orga- nizing is the best strategy to undo the damage caused by a generation of insidious corporate inﬂuence over media policy. It is a strategy that can yield results not just in Washington but also with any government that is struc- tured—at least nominally—to be responsive to public input. Outside-in orga- nizing is an approach that has allowed us to use the Internet to save the Internet. This conﬂuence of the medium and the message give new leverage to the ﬁght against seemingly insurmountable odds.

OPPOSING FOR CES 
The history of the Internet has been a history of openness and innovation as well as a history of steady encroachment on the fundamental ideas underlying the Internet’s evolution.
It has been twenty-ﬁve years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee designed an open protocol for the World Wide Web. It is this innovation—and the end-to-end network engineering principle put in place by other Internet founders like Vint Cerf—that served as catalysts for the Internet’s explosive growth (Jakma 2011). These foundations had far-reaching political implications, favoring systems that are more decentralized and democratic, promoting universal access to information and amplifying dissident voices. Without the inherent protections an open Internet oﬀers, political voices that lack a big-money megaphone will be drowned out.
It is an approach that has also given us a truly free marketplace of ideas where even the smallest entrepreneur can theoretically compete with giant corpora- tions. (Would we have many of the Internet’s most innovative businesses—like Twitter, YouTube, or Etsy—had they been unable to enter the market on a level playing ﬁeld?).
The alternate history of the Internet is one of steady encroachment on these fundamental ideas by gatekeeper media. In the United States, companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have managed to chip away at the rules that
 
were put in place to protect openness. Their goal is to impose a gatekeeper business model on content—anything that allows Internet service providers to squeeze more proﬁt out of the rush of data.
At the center of the tug-of-war over the Internet is the issue of net neutrality. Should Internet users’ rights to communicate without interference be protected under the law? Or should Internet access providers be able to treat the network and the content that ﬂows across it as theirs to censor and exploit?

THE OUT SIDEINSIDE CHALLENGE 
Since its founding ten years ago, Free Press has taken up the cause of media users of every stripe. The net neutrality battle has taken center stage in our work. Our challenge in the face of such institutional corruption is to shame those in Washington who sell their inﬂuence to the highest bidder while ampli- fying the public voice in key policy debates.
To accomplish this we had to frame the debate correctly. The battle for net neutrality was not a clash of corporate titans and their lobbyists—even if the mainstream media often painted it as a standoﬀ between Google and AT&T. The real story was one of a new political movement pitting the interests of all Internet users against the narrow concerns of a handful of wealthy and politi- cally inﬂuential corporate elites (see, for example, Labaton [2007] for a jour- nalist using the Clash of Titans frame). Although net neutrality advocates were vastly outspent and outmanned in the halls of power, industry could not kill the power of an engaged, passionate, and connected public.
Our outside-in approach on net neutrality relied upon the expertise and credibility of Free Press “inside” experts—lawyers, researchers and advocates— while simultaneously mobilizing hundreds of organizational allies and millions of “outside” activists to sign petitions, call Congress, and attend FCC hearings and local rallies from Minneapolis to Mountain View.
Employing this strategy for net neutrality seems so obvious in some respects that it’s amazing how often it is not used. Insiders regularly fail to engage the public on key issues and then wonder why people never seem to care. And popular ideas fail to take root in Washington because there’s nobody on the inside making the case—or worse, the appointed insiders are actively working against the interest of their constituents.
The key is establishing a symbiosis. The insiders need the threat of a public outcry to get a seat at the table. But hundreds of thousands of calls and letters to Congress and the FCC are worthless without the inside knowledge to target the right decision-makers at the right time. You need to strike a balance between the credibility of the policy experts and the creativity of the ﬁeld.
Though vastly outnumbered on Capitol Hill—and largely absent at industry cocktail parties at campaign fundraisers—Free Press has relied on a small group of advocates and allies to represent us in Washington. We work with a network
 
of social justice and civil liberties allies to connect with key congressional staﬀ- ers and educate “grasstops” leaders, and conduct independent research and analysis. We collaborated closely with legal scholars such as Columbia’s Tim Wu, and Harvard University’s Susan Crawford, and Lawrence Lessig, whose widely inﬂuential writing on open networks, universal access and free culture have captivated a generation of Internet advocates.
The campaign insiders also reached out to potential industry allies. Internet “edge” companies—including Google, Amazon, and Netﬂix—had formed the Open Internet Coalition in 2006, but its corporate members often got cold feet when facing pressure from Capitol Hill. While at times working on legisla- tive strategy alongside the Internet companies that supported net neutrality, Free Press never took their money. As tempting as it might have been to tap into the corporate coﬀers, it was more important to remain independent. One needed only to look at our opponents to see what happened when legitimate groups got coopted by corporate cash.
Insiders are often skittish about grassroots eﬀorts—largely because they can’t control them. The public outreach—spearheaded by Free Press, MoveOn.org, CREDO Action, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and other groups— has helped ﬁnd remarkable and genuine local stories that showed how taking away net neutrality would harm everyday people and small businesses. By letting the grassroots speak for themselves we managed to overcome the reluc- tance of some Washington, DC, decision-makers, who view the larger, public- interest advocacy groups as just another interested party.

SET TING THE STA G E FOR    
The story of 2014 was of all these overlapping networks coalescing into a remarkable campaign. Online, a massive Internet slowdown was joined by forty thousand websites, including such major platforms as Netﬂix, Tumblr, and Etsy. All told, more than four million people ﬁled oﬃcial comments with the FCC—more than on any other issue in the agency’s history. Oﬄine, the highlights included repeated rallies outside the FCC and at Obama fundrais- ers, people camping out on the FCC’s doorstep, enormous video billboards erected in Washington, DC, packed public hearings across the country, and creative street theater. This upsurge in activism attracted the attention of the press and entered popular culture through the viral-video rant of HBO’s John Oliver.
It was the activists who moved the companies and the politicians, not the other way around. The activists created the political space in which President Obama could step into the bully pulpit to push for the strongest net neutral- ity protections. And that gave FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the room to change his mind. On February 26, 2015, the FCC voted to protect net neutral-
 
ity and reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. Wheeler, who was interrupted by multiple standing ovations, called it “the proudest day of my public policy life” (Kang and Fung 2015).
This moment was ten years in the making and marks the biggest win ever for the public interest at the FCC. Net neutrality as an issue has become the gate- way to Internet freedom activism on several related fronts, including opposition to industry mergers like the scuttled deal between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the ﬁght for universal, aﬀordable Internet access, online privacy, and free speech both domestically and on a global scale. Our goal has never been about getting faster movie downloads or new gadgets. The ﬁght for Internet freedom at its core is about democracy—it is about ensuring that citizens have the infor- mation they need to hold their leaders accountable and the tools to have an impact on the decisions shaping their lives. That is why saving the Internet is so important: It might be our best—and last—chance to make an end-run around the mainstream media gatekeepers. But the Internet won’t reach this promise if we don’t demand a seat at the table where decisions about its future are being made. And the only way to get that seat is from the outside-in.