As a Federal Communications Commission vote on the future of net neutrality looms, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian is blanketing Washington, D.C., in crowdfunded bus ads.
It’s not quite the same thing as the “billboard in the backyard” idea he originally pitched, a reprisal of a similar campaign that put a “Don’t Mess With the Internet” billboard in the district of Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the congressman who authored the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). But bus stop ads started cropping up around Washington Monday, a spokesperson for Ohanian told the Daily Dot, soon after Ohanian’s Crowdtilt campaign reached its $20,000 goal Sunday night.
Photo courtesy Ash Dawkins
The campaign finished earlier than expected, Ohanian said, thanks to a push from Reddit’s own dedicated meme-themed cyrptocurrency community, r/dogecoin. And even though FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has changed the wording of his proposal to take a bolder stace against Internet service providers that would charge more to access certain sites at full speed, Ohanian said the ads were still necessary.
“It’s nice to see the chairman responding to the American people’s push for net neutrality, but we won’t stop until broadband is reclassified as the utility we all know it is,” Ohanian told the Daily Dot.
“Like I’m fond of saying, the world isn’t flat but the World Wide Web is—let’s keep it that way by preserving net neutrality.”
FCC building photo via Wikipedia (CC BY SA 3.0) | Billboard photo via Sam Howzit/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed