September 10th is "Internet Slowdown" Day

in internet on 2014-09-04 22:14 (#2S2M)

The Guardian covers an upcoming Net Neutrality protest that already has some high-profile participants:

On 10 September, tech firms including Etsy, FourSquare, KickStarter, Mozilla, Reddit and Vimeo will install a widget on their sites to show how they believe the internet would look if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overturns "net neutrality" rules. [...]

A similar campaign led to the FCC being flooded with comments on the net neutrality legislation - so many that at one point its systems collapsed under the strain.

The sites won't actually run slower; they'll simply display a spinning "loading" symbol that links to more information about net neutrality. Details about the campaign (and the code, if you want to participate!) can be found at the Battle for the Net site.

Will any of the tech news sites join the campaign?

not tech sites (Score: 3, Insightful)

by ticho@pipedot.org on 2014-09-05 06:38 (#2S2X)

I think it would be useless on tech sites, because the campaign is focused on increasing awareness, while visitors on such sites are usually well aware of the net neutrality issue.Plus, a spinning widget like that would probably be lost among other similar widgets on an average nerd's noscript- adblock- requestpolicy- toting browser. :-)

Re: not tech sites (Score: 2, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-05 09:52 (#2S31)

... or their CLI browser (lynx, links, w3m, etc.) :) No, I kind of agree with you. More useful is talking about this stuff on tech sites so the technically-oriented people who read those sites but work at more consumer-oriented sites get the idea and push for authorization to implement it on places like vogue or facebook or victoriassecret or whatever. That would be a real huge success.

I'm optimistic. The last time the world rallied to do this - stop SOPA, I think it was - it made a pretty big splash.