You cannot be a fully functioning 21st-century citizen in America unless you have access to high-speed broadband. It's as simple as that.

Journalism continues to go south, thanks to big media and its strangulation of news, and there's not much left in the way of community or local media. Add to that an internet that has not even started thinking seriously about how it supports journalism. You have these big companies like Google and Facebook who run the news and sell all the ads next to it, but what do they put back into journalism? It isn't much.

There's just the unabashed and unprecedented and disgusting level of money in politics. I don't blame just the Republicans; the Democrats are just about as beholden to it, too.

People depend on the Open Internet to connect and communicate with each other freely. Voters need it to inform themselves before casting ballots. Without prompt corrective action by the Commission to reclassify broadband, this awful ruling will serve as a sorry memorial to the corporate abrogation of free speech.

You cannot be a fully functioning 21st-century citizen in America unless you have access to high-speed broadband. It's as simple as that.

Maybe a better way to put it on this Halloween Day is to say, 'It's not a trick or much of a treat, but it's all you get if you come knocking on the Commission's door today.

If you have an internet service provider that's capable of slowing down other sites, or putting other sites out of business, or favoring their own friends and affiliates and customers who can pay for fast lanes, that's a horrible infringement on free speech. It's censorship by media monopolies. It's tragic: here we have a technology, the internet, that's capable really of being the town square of democracy, paved with broadband bricks, and we are letting it be taken over by a few gatekeepers. This is a first amendment issue; it's free speech versus corporate censorship.