The great Internet Slowdown

[rhoenix]

Tomorrow, September 10, will mark the first great Internet Slowdown — a protest by some of the web’s largest companies over the FCC and US government’s handling of net neutrality. All across the web, on sites such as Reddit, Netflix, and WordPress, a spinning “loading…” icon will appear, reminding everyone that internet slow lanes — where some websites load more slowly than others if you don’t pay your ISP some extra money — are a real possibility unless we write to our country’s lawmakers now. Let me state this clearly: The end of net neutrality would be bad for everyone on the internet except your ISP.

The Internet Slowdown is being arranged by Battle for the Net, a fairly large concerted effort of organizations and people who are trying their best to support net neutrality. Battle for the Net appears to be an off-shoot of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit that popped up during the battle against SOPA and PIPA. Some fairly big companies and organizations have joined the Battle for the Net, including the EFF, ACLU, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Vimeo, iFixit, and Reddit. On September 10, many of these companies — and some other latecomers, such as Netflix — will be displaying a “spinning wheel of death” to symbolize how the FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules would create internet fast lanes and slow lanes.

Clicking the “loading…” icon will then let you sign a petition to US Congress to change the FCC’s proposed rules. There are also animated Twitter avatars, a post-apocalyptic “Battle for the Net” banner that you can post (below), or a push notification that you can send to mobile apps, telling users to “Stop internet slow lanes.” In all cases, none of the great Internet Slowdown of September 10 will actually slow down the internet. Your pages and videos will still load just as quickly — but you may have to click through an interstitial spinning wheel of death (which kind of slows down your surfing, I suppose).

As it stands, the FCC’s new rules on net neutrality — proposed back in May and currently seeking comments — would allow ISPs to create internet fast lanes. The idea is that, under the new rules, your ISP (i.e. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon) will be able to charge for priority access to its network. Conversely, if some companies pay for a fast lane, then the others — who perhaps can’t afford to pay for a fast lane — will end up in a slow lane. There has already been at least one high-profile case of a web service being dumped in the slow lane: Both Verizon and Comcast throttled Netflix’s traffic until it agreed to stump up some more cash.

You might be tempted to sympathize with the ISPs — Netflix does create a huge amount of traffic, after all — but that’s not really the point. If history has taught us anything, it’s that if US ISPs can somehow extract more than their pound of flesh, then they will. It will start with Netflix, Google, Reddit, and the other big services that can afford to pay — they can’t not afford to pay and upset all of their users with a slow service — but then what about everyone else? The whole premise of the internet is that everyone gets a fair whack. The only reason that internet startups even exist in the first place (and then often unseat slow-moving incumbents much faster than anyone ever expected) is because the neutral, decentralized structure of the internet allows them to. If that startup working out of a garage suddenly has to pay $30,000 to Comcast to compete with Facebook, then that startup probably isn’t going anywhere — and neither is the scourge of Facebook.

The Battle for the Net’s Internet Slowdown takes place tomorrow, September 10. Let us know if you come across any cool examples of companies and organizations taking a stand. If you run a website, do your bit and insert one of the Internet Slowdown scripts. Twitter users should use the animated GIFs.

"That's a nice site you have there. It'd be a shame if traffic to it suddenly slowed to a crawl. You can avoid this terrible fate by paying us lots of money."

So, what I'm reading here is that Comcast, Time Warner and others want to treat the Internet like Governor Christy treated the bridge.