Today is Internet Slowdown Day, a day organized by Fight the Future and other public interest organizations to encourage people in the United States to contact the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Congress, and the White House for stronger net neutrality rules.
Citizens in the United States have until September 15 to share their net neutrality comments with the FCC.
Sites across the web joining Internet Slowdown Day will display an alert with the “spinning wheel” symbol you usually see when a site is loading slowly. Note: sites aren’t actually slower; they’re just showing the symbolic loading symbol.
How does net neutrality affects you?
It can be hard to explain, but here goes: imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) suggesting you switch to one of their “fast lane” plans.
For example, if you’re active on Vimeo, Etsy or reddit (who have joined in today’s Internet Slowdown Day protest), imagine your frustration when their sites load slowly.
If you have a website, blog or Tumblr, join the Internet Slowdown Day effort. Spread the news about the slowdown.
On a WordPress.com site, you can activate the Fight for Net Neutrality plugin in Settings. If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, you can install the Internet Defense League Cat Signal plugin (which I’m using on this site).
