Justine Trudeau is "very concerned" about Net Neutrality...

.. and, since Canada and Mexico are busy renegotiating NAFTA with the United States right now, that might not just be posturing. As reported by Motherboard:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says President Donald Trump’s plan to roll back net neutrality protections for the internet “does not make sense” and that he’ll be looking into what he can do to defend net neutrality for the whole internet.

“I am very concerned about the attacks on net neutrality,” Trudeau said in Toronto on Wednesday, in response to a question from Motherboard about Trump’s plans. “Net neutrality is something that is essential for small businesses, for consumers, and it is essential to keep the freedom associated with the internet alive.”

[...]

Trudeau wouldn’t comment specifically on whether he would convey the message to Trump directly.

“We are just absorbing the position the president has taken and looking at the impact it’s going to have in the United States and in Canada,” Trudeau said.

The FCC's decision just happened, so I'm not surprised that the official Canadian response to it is still in the works, but it's good to know that at least one government outside the U.S. is treating this like the international issue that it is. It's looking more and more like the world needs some sort of more distributed internet infrastructure, though, rather than just relying on the U.S. to continue to be the backbone of the entire global communications network. The other sovereign nations of the world need to know that the U.S. can't dictate to everyone and everyone, by fiat, what sort of communications traffic can flow, along with when, where, and how.

Julian Assange, who worked with Trump's campaign to get him elected, finally shows signs of buyer's remorse.

As reported in Gizmodo:

Julian Assange—whose organization Wikileaks’ sad, thirsty Twitter DMs to Donald Trump Jr. recently leaked, revealing he sought to coordinate with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—appears to have had a moment of buyer’s regret on Tuesday evening.

Upon hearing the Republican-controlled FCC had finally scheduled a vote to scrap Barack Obama-era net neutrality rules, potentially enriching massive digital conglomerates at the expense of the open web, some brief glimmer of the old Assange seemed to spark back to life. But not really very brightly, as he was only able to express his opposition to the White House-backed change in the form of convoluted pretzel logic posited as a Machiavellian 4-dimensional chess move.

“Dear @realDonaldTrump,” Assange wrote. “‘Net neutrality’ of some form is important. Your opponents control most internet companies. Without neutrality they can make your tweets load slowly, CNN load fast and infest everyone’s phones with their ads. Careful.”

As Assange has continued to hole up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for years while attempting to avoid extradition, Wikileaks has largely fallen apart and his originally stated mission of radical transparency has increasingly given way to bizarre pro-Trump ramblings, suspiciously biased editorial decisions, and Twitter braggadocio.

That Julian Assange has made himself, and the organization he founded, irrelevant to a discussion that would have been squarely in their wheelhouse only two years ago shows just how profoundly they've both strayed from the path, here. Assange turned Wikileaks into a tool for pursuing his petty, personal vendettas, either oblivious to the damage he was doing, or simply not caring. Trump used Assange when it was convenient, but doesn't need him anymore, so the odds of Trump doing anything to reign in an FCC chairman who was appointed specifically to tear down the Obama-era Net Neutrality provisions are basically zero, and Assange's efforts here are utterly worthless. And probably self-serving, too, since everything Assange does is self-serving.

Fuck Julian Assange.