Rhetorical Context

The Rhetorical Methods

The net neutrality debate had been established in the public sphere well before 2014; however the protesters had continued in very similar ways throughout the movement up until the turning point in the political atmosphere which the movement intended on influencing. The term public sphere, commonly defined as a social space where private citizens gather as a public body, must be altered to fit the frame of this digitally focused protest. Although there were instances were geographically central protest occurred, often the ways in which interest groups, large companies in favor for net neutrality, and common citizens, created a public sphere was through the interactions through social media and online platforms for communication, (Faris). The rhetoric of the movement that will be examined most critically, as a representation of the ways in which Internet protest and participation, will be the communications that took place on the Internet itself.

A key component to analyzing the rhetoric of net neutrality within the protests begins at how the understandings of what “net neutrality” meant formulated into a polarized issue among the various characters who played a key role in using it as a form of rhetoric. Two ideas that surrounded net neutrality, and the goals which net neutrality would attempt to achieve, “no selectivity by the carriers over the content they transmit and no blocking of the access of users to some websites,” established what would later influence the ways it would be both, representative of an Internet that stood for free economic trade, and more broadly advantageous for the movement, as an Internet that guaranteed freedom of speech and expression, (Lee). The consideration of net neutrality as both an economic issue, and a civil liberties issue, expanded the range of identities that had a stake in the FCC decision to strengthen the regulations on the Internet Service providers and carriers. Of course the rhetoric used in the movement as a whole created a streamline consciousness, an overall goal that united the proponents of the two sides of net neutrality, but it is important to consider the ways each side specifically chose to represent the debate, and who made up those sides.

On the side of the free market, the fear that if net neutrality regulations were not passed providers like Comcast and Time Warner would price gouge competitors or give certain benefits to companies who paid extra for faster connection speeds, drove both large corporations and small start up corporations to protest for a ban on any ability these ISP’s had to apply this type of dynamic on the Internet. Companies like Google, Netflix, Reddit, and Facebook make up a small portion of the loudest voices who were pro net neutrality rules, and during the 2014 cycle, gained a lot of media attention from nationally recognized outlets like the Wall Street Journal who published articles recognizing the efforts these companies made through online protests to make the issues more well known, (Nagesh). The specific protest detailed in the article occurred in the later stages of 2014. It had to do with websites implementing a loading circle on their websites so their users were given the chance to imagine what an Internet speed might look like if ISPs were allowed to privilege some content over other content, and this would link the users to another site that offered more information on the facts of net neutrality (Nagesh). In an earlier form of protest from these companies, a letter was written to the FCC to show a solidarity on the side of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo! that a lack of strict rules on the service providers would be a threat to the Internet, (Faris). These two instances of protest, on the part of the very specific identity that large corporations took on during the debate, show that they unified to collectively impose a presence on the FCC, while also aiding in the disbursement of information to the general population.

While the identities that surrounded business and the economic side of net neutrality used the movement’s goals and online resources to make known their position on the issue, the other side of the pro net neutrality protest was dedicated to the civil liberties issue, which seemed more prevalent when it came to how citizens came to understand the movement. Such groups like Free Press, the ACLU, and internet sites like BattlefortheNet, were only some of the most outspoken voices of the debate fighting for the human rights aspect of net neutrality. In a study performed by The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the amount of coverage and recognition the net neutrality debate received at different times during 2014 was cataloged to plainly show the ways the movement traveled through the Internet. Free Press, who was responsible for establishing the website savetheinternet.com, and battleforthenet.com, set up by another organization, were seen and shared multiple times throughout the debate. In the study, statistics are drawn from counting the number of “inlinks” certain sites or news stories got during the debate, and in september of 2014 battleforthenet received the highest number of inlinks among other sites at 103, (Faris). The ways sites like these helped use their influence to gain traction with those users who were aware of them was through providing insight into how anyone can help. In the case of battlefortheinternet, “they counted over two million emails sent, more than three hundred thousand phone calls, and close to eight hundred thousand additional comments to the FCC,” (Faris).

The results the movement desired were also significantly aided by Twitter and the public sphere that followed the stories as they were published. Battlefortheinternet and savetheinternet received 174, 927 and 7006 retweets, respectively, on only a few of their stories, (Faris). In another study focusing specifically on how Twitter influenced the net neutrality debate, a small data pool was collected during the beginning of 2014. They collected 6,289 tweets that contained #netneutrality all in a span of two weeks, and it was found that 4,150 users participated, and 1,477 links were cited that linked to news articles, blogs, government agencies and interest groups, (Lee).  The ability to share information and ideas quickly ensured that throughout the movement, the lack of large online protests or coordinated efforts,  at whatever moment the media was not focused on the issue of net neutrality, did not curb the conversation in a way that the movement did not want it to be taken.

It’s most beneficial to employ the concept of cloud protesting to explain the ways this type of movement maintained a relationship with its audience and its members. The power in this movement was the ways that it allowed the individual to participate at any moment, in anyway they chose, “online action encourages diverse participation by permitting individual activists to select specific activities to reflect their individuality, (Milan). Milan continues to also argue that cloud protesting can in turn weaken the movement by not setting up a set standard of loyalty and commitment that a geographically based protest would but that was certainly not the case here. The practices these groups had been taking allowed new members to constantly join in at any moment from anywhere, which rendered loyalty and commitment pointless. The loyalty and commitment had to come from the identity leaders, which consisted of large corporations invested in net neutrality, and large civil liberties organizations focused on mobilizing the public to voice the concerns from the bottom to the top in order to be heard. The main protesters were those who shared via Twitter and other social media websites, those who participated in sending the FCC emails and comments on their website, which in one instance was enough to crash their entire website (Faris), called out to members of congress, and all those who signed online petitions to keep the matter relevant. While Milan believes the cloud comes at the cost of a weakening, this protest movement speaks directly opposite to that, although the issue in this protest has a much larger framework of identity that applied to almost every citizen in the nation, rather than a smaller more contained identity.