As I've said before, building publicly owned networks is our only long-term solution to ensuring a free and open internet. Tomorrow, the FCC is expected to vote AGAINST the wishes of MOST Americans and end Net-Neutrality. All of the big providers in Bellingham are Anti-Net Neutrality. The article below outlines the issue and has a link to a petition you can sign to try and stop the FCC. It's worth noting that if we had a publicly owned network we could have Net Neutral providers regardless of what the FCC does. For example, Hamster Net ISP CO-OP has already pre-committed to be Net-Neutral so has Google and many other companies. This means that no matter what the FCC does, if we had a publicly owned network we could choose Net Neutral providers. Again, the biggest problem we have in Bellingham, especially when you look at the numbers, is lack of real choice, largely because we don't have adequate infrastructure and partially because our current government loves big telecoms, regardless of their behavior. I also received an update yesterday confirming that we received virtually nothing of value from the CenturyLink deal, but I'll save that for another update in a few days. Make no mistake, CenturyLink is NOT a good alternative to other providers, especailly when it comes to Net Neutrality. Although CenturyLink has issued intentionally confusing statements about their Net Neutrality stance, they have been on the front lines of fighting AGAINST Net Neutrality and are NOT a real solution for Bellingham. In fact they confirmed at the 7/24 meeting that they will NOT be expanding with new services into the county, will NOT even be providing those new services to most, will not even keep providing them if they don't get 20% of users within 5 years, and will NOT even give us a local office unless they get 30% of customers (that's 6% more than Comcast). More on this in the next update.