Europeans! You've got 48h to contact your MEP and demand a free, open and fair Internet!

If you live in the EU, you have 48 hours to contact your MEP and urge her or him to vote for the "Citizens' Rights Amendments" to the Telecoms Package. These amendments will keep the Internet neutral, restrict censorship and spying."

Jeremie Zimmerman sez,

Threats to citizens' basic rights and freedoms and to the neutrality of Internet could be voted without any safeguard in the EU legislation regarding electronic communication networks (Telecoms Package). EU citizens have two days to call all Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ask them to vote for the "Citizens' Rights Amendments", in the second reading of the Telecoms Package. These amendments include all the safeguards that were removed in the "compromise amendments", as well as provisions protecting against "net discrimination" practices and filtering of content...

URGENT: Ask MEPs to adopt Citizens' Rights Amendments on May the 6th.

Information on contacting your MEP

(Thanks, JZ!)

• [meeware]

  I didn’t have an opportunity to phone my MEPs (plus, I have LOADS of them- EU level representation is a cloud lke affair). Anyway, of the seven I emailed, I received three responses:
  Nigel Farage of UKIP (a rather fringe party who want to disband the whole EU) was wholeheartedly in support of the ammendments and sent a brief, but clearly personal note. Which is nice.
  Caroline Lucas of the Green party sent a detailed response today, via her assistant which gave a detailed response outlining the current state of play as of tuesday, and making clear their party’s commitment to the principles of free and equal access to the internet.
  And finally Sharon Bowles of the Liberal Democrats gave an update on the voting process and indicated that she felt it was going to be necessary to put pressure on national governments not to wheedle their way out of EU wide commitments to net neutrality and access rights.

  All three of these groups seem to be strongly in favour of the approach advocated on these pages. I should make clear that I am in no way affiliated to any of these political groups, but that these are my representatives in the European parliament.

• [Antiqueight]

  Done – I even got a couple of replies from MEPs saying they agreed and would vote it down – I will be watching.

• [Alex_M]

  Even the compromise proposal is a heck of a lot better than the state of affairs in the USA.

  France is not going to get their ‘three strikes’ rule on internet disconnection. It will require a court order.

• [coffeemoon]

  silly. I sent a link and warning through about this three days ago, more people could have read this. Nevermind.

• [Anonymous]

  For those with a short attention span and in need of some motivational peptalk for this: Here’s a quick snappy video to explain it to you! (complete with usable e-mail template and all) http://bit.ly/oEAW3

• [cleepa]

  I find it disturbing that the public never seems to have more than a couple of days to contact MEPs on issues like this. There have been so many posts Cory has made like this one that urge people into frantic last minute action. By contrast, the recording industry corporations (or whoever is championing the latest law) seem to have months and months to submit their arguments. This is unbalanced and wrong! The goverment exists to serve the people, not the corporations.

• [Michael Leung]

  Wow, the evilness of the government about the Intertubes spreads everywhere.

• [annoyingmouse]

  I’ve just spotted that the supposedly neutral European Parliament June 2009 elections information site has today put up an utterly biased article where Conservative British MEP Malcolm Harbour is given a platform with which to voice his rubbish. The article couldn’t be more unbalanced in it’s “think about the children” and anti-Black Out Europe lies. It is a laughable article that I would have almost ignored if it hadn’t been on the main page of this information site.

• [Anonymous]

  You can send a message to your MEPS in the website http://xmailer.hacktivistas.net/en/message

• [Anonymous]

  Mass mailing campaign is at work to let MEPs know:
  http://hacktivistas.net/content/open-letter-to-meps
  http://digg.com/d1qGZs

  isaac

• [agger]

  #3 Cleepa,

  one of the reasons for this is the difference of means: The industry – indsutry of all kinds, recording industry, telcoms, software & hardware industry (e.g., re: software patents and surveillance, which could yield big contracts), pharma industry – maintain a heavy presence at all times.

  By contrast, there’s only a small handful of activists representing the other side, and a similar small handful of “progressive” MEPs. So in situations like this the industry gets to write the main papers, and the activists and minority MEPs have to appeal to common sense and public outrage to get through amendments. So when sometimes dates are fixed or moved in the last minute, civil rights suffer, not the industry; and the industry doesn’t need public support anyway, it uses euros instead.

• [LX]

  Sorry, us Germans are already busy almost DDOSing our governments petition server to stop the plans of the family minister to censor the Internet to allegedly stop child porn (will not work, says sweden).

  Greetings, LX