Thousands of Americans are heading to Verizon stores across the country today to protest the telecom giant’s efforts to gain control of what they can see and hear on the internet.

The Verizon visitors are part of a nationwide drive to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to reject its chairman’s plan to vote next week to roll back “net neutrality” regulations that protect the free flow of information online.

There’s an excellent chance a Verizon store near you is the site of a demonstration organized by Team Internet, a coalition of groups supporting net neutrality. Find out where you can join in the effort at verizonprotests.com.

FCC chief Ajit Pai’s proposal would allow Verizon and other internet service providers (ISPs) to play favorites among the millions of companies, groups and individuals who use the net. The ISPs could give a higher priority and assign higher transmission speeds to data from some sources than from others.

Comcast, for example, could choose to speed up news, entertainment, and information programming from NBC/Universal, which it owns, and slow down content from CBS, Fox and other competitors. The ISPs also could choose to treat the internet like a cable TV system, charging popular content providers like Facebook and Twitter a premium to move their data and/or levying extra charges on users to access that content.

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