Yesterday was the big coordinated "Day of Action" thing, where a pile of websites put up banners and fake loading spinners to protest the FCC's plan to gut Title II net neutrality rules. I spent most of the day just clicking around to see who did what, instead of, you know, working, so here's the rundown.
Reddit's version was probably my favorite purely on craft. Their alien mascot showed up with a little "your reddit is loading..." spinner that just sat there being smug about it, and there was a banner underneath explaining what was happening and linking out to the FCC comment form. Simple, on-brand, didn't feel like it cost them anything to build. Amazon put a banner on some of its pages pointing people to contact their reps. Etsy did something similar. Kickstarter had a whole explainer page up. Vimeo had a spinning wheel over their homepage video for a few seconds before it resolved into the real content, which was a nice touch because it actually simulated the thing they were complaining about instead of just describing it.
Netflix, which is the company you'd think would go hardest here given they've had actual, real fights with ISPs over interconnection fees in the past, mostly just posted about it on social media instead of doing anything dramatic on the site itself. Kind of a letdown, honestly, since they're the one company in this whole coalition with a legitimately good "here's what throttling did to us in real life" story to tell. Pornhub also participated, which got more headlines than the actual policy content did, because of course it did. That's the internet for you: put "Pornhub joins net neutrality protest" in a headline and it'll outperform actual FCC docket coverage nine times out of ten.
Here's my complaint, and I said a version of this in the comments on some other blog and got yelled at for it, so I might as well say it here where it's my own turf: the fake-buffering-icon gimmick is cute, but it's theater. Nobody's internet actually got slower yesterday. The sites that did this the best (Vimeo, kind of) at least made you feel the metaphor for a second. Most of the rest were just a banner with a link, which is fine, that's activism, links are how you get people to fill out comment forms, but let's not pretend it's the same thing as an ISP actually throttling your connection. The theatrical stuff is for getting people who don't normally think about this to notice something's happening. It's not actually informative about what a world without these protections looks like day to day. If you want that, you've got to go read about what happened with Comcast and BitTorrent traffic a decade ago, or the AT&T FaceTime blocking thing, and that's a lot less shareable than a spinning wheel.
The FCC's public comment system has apparently been getting hammered for weeks now with people (and bots, and form letters, both directions) weighing in on Chairman Pai's proposal to roll back the 2015 Open Internet Order. I don't have a strong read on whether any of this actually moves the needle at the commission. My gut says no, not really, comment volume has never stopped a determined FCC before. But it's not nothing either. It got my very non-technical sister to text me asking "wait what is net neutrality again" for the first time in her life, and that's more than most policy fights manage.
Separate thing that happened this same week and is only tangentially related: Amazon's own site fell over a bit during Prime Day on Tuesday, product pages timing out, people getting error pages instead of deals. There's something almost funny about the company running banners asking people to care about a fast, open internet also having its own servers buckle under load two days earlier. Not the same issue at all, obviously, one's an infrastructure capacity problem and the other's a policy fight, but it made for a weird one-two punch in my browser history this week.
Anyway. If you haven't filed a comment and you care about this, the window's still open. I filed mine last week. Took about four minutes.