Meet The Oregon Middle Schoolers Fighting For Net Neutrality
Luca, a 12-year-old student at Mt. Tabor Middle School in Portland, Oregon, first learned about net neutrality through an Instagram post. “Before it was repealed, I was just trying to tell people about it,” Luca tells Gizmodo. Soon, she’d gotten her two friends, 12-year-old Athena and 13-year-old Lola, interested in net neutrality—an issue that is of vital importance for the internet but one that is wonky and complex even for many adults. A month after Luca saw that Instagram post, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission led by Chairman Ajit Pai voted to overturn the agency’s net neutrality protections, which prevented internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or throttling online content and prohibited them from making “paid prioritization” deals—so-called “fast lanes” for companies willing to pay more to have their content delivered to customers at a higher quality than competitors who don’t pay up.