14 DAY TRIAL // Net neutrality has a lot of supporters, in and outside the United States, and many of the companies that believe in a free Internet have already expressed their support by joining in the protests for Internet Slowdown Day.
Others have chosen to express their support in a different manner – by creating a viral video. Domain registrar and web hosting company Namecheap made a request with Thinkmodo, the company that’s behind many of the viral videos out there, to do something that’s going to reflect the struggles of net neutrality.
The result is quite amusing and it definitely does what it seeks out to do – attract your attention. That’s because the actors in the video appear sitting on toilets to suggest that “our rights will be flushed away” if the FCC kills net neutrality.
You read that right. The video presents people sitting on toilets and moving around New York City, all wrapped up in a song with social lyrics.
“Thinkmodo wanted to make this complex issue accessible to a broad audience so it created a song, and fun lyrics. We had it performed by singer, Bobby Jo Valentine from Petaluma, CA. We are hoping that this becomes the anthem for Net Neutrality as the FCC weighs the interest of the public over that of ISP giants like Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, etc,” said James Percelay, co-founder of Thinkmodo.
Going viral as we speak
The video for “Don’t Flush Our Rights Down the Toilet” has attracted 355,951 views since it was published on September 2, which is pretty good for such a campaign.
Namecheap has decided that it will donate $0.25 per retweet of the video to www.netneutrality.com in support of lobbying the FCC, which means that there's a lot of money on the way to the cause.
Thinkmodo tells Softpedia that the video was shot over the course of a month in July and August in New York City, where it understandably attracted huge crowds every day. Since this is a stop-motion video, they only managed to shoot about ten seconds of footage per day.
If you were wondering, no, the actors aren’t actually naked even through their underwear is around their ankles (skin-colored Spanks seem to be the answer), while the toilets aren’t actually like the ones you can buy in stores, but rather made out of lightweight fiberglass so they wouldn’t be a chore to move around all day.
