Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

I'm also seeing something strange on my iPhone. It looks like there's something off with the antialiasing, and the text isn't selectable. It looks like a scaled up image, though I don't think it is.

> I heartily disagree with this approach. Not only does it harken back to the days of Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and the like where each service had its own content, but it's very anti-internet.

Anti-internet to ban an ISP that is trying to decimate the internet? How does that logically make any sense?

A fine example of the naiveté of VC's who vicariously play business through unprofitable companies. Someone who's spent too much time in a play pen with children, dollars and matches. Are you mad? Brad?

At the most basic level, I have a checkout on my website where I take actual cash from my customers and unless it's thousands of dollars every day, I'm going to have to close my doors. Yup, that's right. I have expenses that I need to pay: Staff, hosting costs, insurance, office rent. And if that money doesn't keep on coming every day at the rate I projected, I get to fire my staff.

So, Brad. You idiot. You really think I'm going to slow down my website to play your flaccid little game of online pretend activism and put my staff and business at risk to do it?

Hire a lobbyist. Get the job done. And grow up.

Why stop at the slow lane? There is nothing preventing ISP gatekeepers from wholeheartedly denying access.

Slowness is just the beginning -- the end-goal is making the internet into multiple competing walled gardens where users are treated as silos that require permission to access. The global reach of the internet is at risk here.

Imagine if Netflix wasn't accessible to Comcast users from the beginning because they wouldn't pay the toll. Would it have thrived and grown as quickly as it did, or would it have died in it's infancy?

What about Skype? Skype stepped on the toes of incumbent ISPs' long-distance revenue streams, I wouldn't put it past AT&T to purposefully degrade the quality of Skype calls or even outright deny them from happening. Prior to being bought out by Microsoft, would they have had the revenue to pay for access to users? Would Microsoft have even bought Skype at all?

I don't think slowing the site down really helps convey the speed difference anyways, because they aren't seeing it apples-to-apples.

Instead, I think you want to load two version of the site in to iFrames (or something) and throttle one.

This would also be a good way to show a user how crappy their connection is compared to a _real_ high speed connection: The problem isn't just that they are creating a "fast" lane and a "slow" lane, but the fact that US-based "fast" lanes are actually fairly slow to begin with.