A handwritten Obama thank you letter to the reddit community from the President himself had reached the front page of reddit at around 8 p.m. EST Thursday evening.
The victory prose thanked the reddit community for its unending support in the fight for net neutrality, a call for a “free and open Internet” that some have criticized as government overreach that could actually be the end of the free and open Internet, once and for all.
Spend enough time on tech forums and news sites, and you’ll see that most people agree that something needs to be done to protect the Internet, but parties diverge on the best way to do that.
President Obama joins most in not being a fan of the so-called “Internet fast lanes” that companies like Comcast had planned so they could charge more to large content providers like Netflix.
The fear led the President to champion new rules and regulations that were enacted by the FCC on Thursday.
The problem that some have with Obama’s net neutrality “fix” is that it comes with more than 300 pages of unpublished regulations.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months, both in pushback from a Republican Congress and the court system, which hasn’t been kind to net neutrality in the past.
But for now, the President could declare a victory, and he wanted reddit to know that it was a victory he wouldn’t be claiming alone, telling the online community it was “thanks to many of you.”
A large number of the 5,000+ commenters who responded to the letter were ecstatic, but one response in particular broke free from that thread and ended up on page one later in the evening.
And this person wasn’t so thrilled. User “Ableyoungthug” wrote the following.
“Maybe he will see this and then do something… Dear Obama, Stop the NSA from reading my s**t and we are even…. [Signed] Reddit”
This Obama thank you letter amassed more than 500 comments as of this post, and it highlights one of the big arguments that net neutrality detractors have against what happened Thursday — that it’s too early to celebrate the decision when the 300+ pages are unpublished and approved by a man, who, according to whistleblower Edward Snowden , has put the government spying program started under President George W. Bush on steroids during his six years in office.
As one commenter puts it, “Are these the people we want determining what is ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ on the Internet?”
What do you think of the Obama thank you letter, readers? Is it representative of sour GOP grapes, or is the net neutrality victory one of those “careful what you wish for” moments? Sound off in the comments section.