Battle for the Net

Big tech companies plan “Internet Slowdown” to fight for net neutrality

Mozilla, reddit, others to display the "spinning wheel of death" next week.

Fight for the Future

Next week, some of the biggest tech companies will lead a symbolic “Internet Slowdown” to protest the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality proposal.

“Several top websites—including Etsy, Kickstarter, Foursquare, WordPress, Vimeo, reddit, Mozilla, Imgur, Meetup, Cheezburger, Namecheap, Bittorrent, Gandi.net, StartPage, BoingBoing, and Dwolla—announced that they will be joining more than 35 advocacy organizations and hundreds of thousands of activists in a day of action that will give a glimpse into what the Internet might look like if the FCC’s proposed rules go into effect,” a blog post today from the advocacy group “Fight for the Future” said.

Further Reading

The FCC doesn’t have to authorize Internet fast lanes—they’re already legal

What the FCC chair really means when he says he isn't legalizing paid fast lanes.

The FCC’s proposal would require Internet service providers to provide a vaguely defined minimum level of service to all legal applications and websites, but it would not prevent ISPs from charging companies for faster access to Internet users. Net neutrality advocates argue that so-called “fast lanes” will divide the Internet into different tiers, with deep-pocketed companies having unfair advantages over smaller ones. But the FCC isn’t allowed to issue stronger restrictions on fast lanes unless it takes the controversial step of reclassifying broadband as a utility or "common carrier" service.

The FCC received more than 1 million comments from the public, with “around two-thirds of commenters object[ing] to the idea of paid priority for Internet traffic, or division of Internet traffic into separate speed tiers,” according to the Sunlight Foundation. Reply comments are being accepted by the FCC until September 15.

The Internet Slowdown protest will happen on September 10. It won’t be a real slowdown; instead, sites will install widgets “display[ing] prominent messages that include an infinitely-spinning ‘site loading’ icon—or the so-called ‘spinning wheel of death’—to symbolize what surfing the web could be like without net neutrality,” Fight for the Future said. “These alerts will direct the sites’ users to call and/or e-mail policymakers in support of net neutrality.”

Ways to join the protest include downloading the website widget, sending push notifications to mobile app users, changing social media profile pictures to the spinning wheel of death, or sharing photos such as this one:

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Originally posted by Jon Brodkin - Sep 4, 2014 8:35 pm UTC