Awesome Stuff: Want To Make Sure The Internet Stays Open And Free For Innovation?

Broadband

from the tooting-our-own-horn-a-bit dept

Each week, we post an “awesome stuff” post that looks at a few interesting (and sometimes not so interesting) crowdfunding projects. This week, however, we’re doing our own. On Monday, we launched a crowdfunding campaign to support our coverage of net neutrality. The idea is to let us put more resources towards really digging into every aspect of this battle. We’re a very small team trying to cover a variety of subjects, and we work quite hard at it, but if we can dedicate greater efforts towards this important debate, we’re hoping to really dig deep and look at what’s really happening — beyond just the basic headlines of what’s out there.

We were able to do that with the SOPA/PIPA fight, but as I mentioned in our last post, doing so meant that we lost big on the advertising side. While that didn’t stop us, we’d rather not have to worry about that, but rather just focus on just getting you the best reporting we can. While we’ve written hundreds of stories on net neutrality, here are a few memorable ones to highlight the kinds of things we want to be able to keep bringing you:

• How telco astroturfers tried to bring down review of a book about net neutrality
• What inefficient airline boarding processes have to do with net neutrality
• Asking if Comcast CEO Brian Roberts would pay Netflix’s bandwidth bill, after he claimed it was “free.”
• Verizon lobbyists pretending that “blind, deaf and disabled people” are supportive of an internet fast and slow lane
• Looking at whether or not broadband providers are violating FTC rules by lying about what they’re delivering to customers
• Discussing how Verizon loves to be classified under Title II in order to get subsidies and tax breaks, but pretends it would be deathly if it were expanded

As you can see, we really try to dig deeper, past the straight up headlines to see what else is going on. We can do a lot more of that, but we need to reach our funding goal. We’re off to an amazing start so far, with it getting well over a third of the way funded in less than a week. But there’s still a long way to go, and it needs your help. Please, if you can, look at supporting this project, and sharing it with your friends.

Once again, if you donate now, there are matching funds that we get from a group of donors, meaning that every dollar you give creates twice as much impact. Please consider supporting this effort. We won’t let you down.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, crowdfunding, innovation, net neutrality