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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

This has been the weakest day of action I could imagine. I thought sites were going to be throttled. Turns out its just some color changes and, oh, reddit has a fancy "slow-loading" gif for their website name. A real wake-up call!

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This is exactly what I thought.

Went to reddit.com...where's the Net Neutrality protest? Oh I just realized they made their logo a gif that looks like it loads slow...and they made a post...

Went to google.com...the doodle is unrelated and I saw nothing about net neutrality on the site...

Went to mozilla.org and I see absolutely nothing about it. I feel like I must be missing something here.

Hackernews...looks the same but slightly grayed. Oh the black bar is a link, didn't realize that. But no messages or anything obvious.

LinkedIn.com maybe? Nothing

Twitter? They have a hashtag that's trending...that's it.

Facebook? I see nothing. Not even a trending topic.

This is a very luke warm day of technology companies protesting net neutrality. I expected at least a tiny blurb on a homepage SOMEWHERE. So far Netflix and DuckDuckGo are the only large sites that I've notice actually put something on their homepage.

Agreed, this is a very poor showing of support from major websites.

I remember Wikipedia doing a "black out" day, along with several other websites years back. If you visited the web page, all you saw was a black page and a quick explanation that the web could be censored if legislation were to pass.

I've visited several participants' sites to see nothing. GitHub didn't have a single thing, Wikipedia: nothing, and Google (or Alphabet) isn't even listed on the list of participants [0].

[0] https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/#participants

The Wikipedia community seems to have a strong dislike [0][1][2] for anything like the SOPA blackout, partially as it's not as black-and-white as SOPA, and partially because Wikipedia directly wouldn't be affected (their site is pretty fast).

Worth noting that Wikipedia Zero [3] exists, and has been taking flak for not being the most NN-friendly initiative.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25...

I think archive.org has the best Net Neutrality protest. Very _in your face_ and clear

Why do you want to ruin the internet more for the rest of the world today?

Because I want to protect it for the whole world for the future. Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, Reddit, and other major services you use which are supporting net neutrality all started as American companies. If this measure fails, it's less likely that equally good companies will come from the resulting situation.

Sorry about your Internet today, but they're doing it for your Internet tomorrow.

weird considering they all came about from that "situation"

We all know US market != Rest of the world market. What you have at home as a US Citizen isn't what the rest of the world gets. I agree that you should have a strong action at home. But spreading this to other countries and calling it collateral damage just shows how little consideration you have for the rest of the world.

Pornhub is doing more for this than many companies listed here if you check their homepage (still very minimal), which says a lot to me...

Reddit didn't even change their banner announcement - it's currently promoting signing up for Reddit Gifts. The slow-loading logo only has a clue to what it's about in the alt-text; the link hasn't changed.

Actually, twitter trending a hashtag on it is pretty good given that is their core product. The rest, yes I agree.

Sure it's a core part but the trending hashtags are not easily visible unless you're on a desktop site and they just blend into the background. They don't seem very prominent at all and I certainly missed them at first when I was looking around for Net Neutrality references.

I would be curious if users even look at those on mobile since it requires more effort to see.

facebook and wikipedia cannot protest net neutrality; they are working to get (a version of) their websites zero-rated.

I think we need a new term and perhaps a visceral, easily understandable metaphor.

Common Joe just doesn't get it or know what we're talking about.

He instantly gets "death panel" or "fake news." But net neutrality sounds like something fuzzy almost benign.

“Open Internet” is good, and is what the FCC policy focus has always been labelled.

The biggest problem with terms with a positive connotation is that both sides will claim them.

For example, Comcast will simply say "we support Open Internet" with the implication that "Open" in this context means "We can do whatever we want with our own lines.", i.e. complete corporate freedom. This deliberately promotes confusion, and then whoever has the most money wins.

In my opinion, the biggest problem is that this topic is relatively more technical than most people are used to understanding, which makes it very difficult to convey the various ramifications without over-simplifying.

I've always thought "Anti-Internet Racketeering" described the issue and ramifications pretty succinctly.

Too many syllables for a good slogan. Need something like "It's my internet!" or "Fight internet extortion!"

Many countries don't have network neutrality. In Australia, Optus use to off "free social" where Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and a few other sites didn't count against your bandwidth.

Add network neutrality legislation and it would be very easy to lobby against: "Turnbull wants you to pay more for Facebook and Twitter"

Most people don't have an understanding of what Quality of Service is.

Perhaps the "corporate internet"?

At least it has a negative connotation to it, while "net neutrality" has not.

I'm guessing it is easier for people to oppose something, than to support something. Opposing something feels more urgent.

The ever popular 'Free Choice/Freedom' angle? Removal of Net Neutrality ensures that the ISP gets to decide what the consumer watches. 'Don't let them tell you what to watch!' (followed by horrified alpha males watching Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman on Youtube or whatever else passes for horrifying nowadays.)

How dare you imply that Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman was horrible!

Ha, just passing along a tired old joke :). I personally never saw the show myself but plenty of shows had a good time making fun of it (Home Improvement, Red Green Show (?)) I guess I stopped watching TV after the 90s sitcoms stopped so my references are old and tired.

I know right? The question for me is why? Netflix has gone on record saying "well, we're big enough to negotiate the deals we want so we don't particularly care if the ladder gets pulled up behind us". I imagine many other big corporations/sites are in similar positions. But even so I doubt they'd want to make said deals in the first place, they'd be expensive. So isn't a stronger response in their best interest?

Or perhaps they're all secretly looking forward to fast lanes they can buy...

I think they just don't see the point.

I don't think the people pushing to dismantle net neutrality are stupid. They know that removing it is bad for innovation and consumers but they'd rather help the ISPs make more money than help keep America's economy healthy overall.

Probably because they directly receive benefits from the ISPs.

So since we are all being ignored, why will yelling louder make a difference?

It worked against SOPA/PIPA, although granted that was legislation up for a vote, not the policy of a commission. At the very least it might give some of the politicians a moment of pause to know they're seriously pissing off other powerful moneyed interests, and it would certainly increase public awareness and perhaps make more people care. If you talk about how YouTube might be throttled without Net Neutrality, people will definitely care.

Don't you find it weird that businesses have to fake that it's an issue by adding gimmicks to their sites like the slow loading gif? Maybe if it become an actual instantiated issue in the future we could expect a real grassroots movement, but as is, the arguments are mostly academic and it's hard to rally people around that.

I would like to see sites with severely limited usage as well but I imagine that would result in angry customers who don't give a rip one way or the other hurting the bottom line.

This is correct. I am not a fan of net neutrality and the level of "protest" that has appeared today already makes me uneasy. It's easy to claim that google is so monolithic that blocking its services for a day would be a crippling blow to the anti-net neutrality crowd, but it's really just blackmail. I don't think the public would be responsive to such a threat, and there are plenty of alternatives (even if the quality isn't quite the same). I'm sure one of those alternatives would be content to not force its politics on its customers.

Wow - not a friend of net neutrality? Such person exists?! And reads hacker news? Site which sucess is directly connected to open internet ..

I thought that this will be the one issue where hacker news crowd will be united.

Google has global network with their caches everywhere. If you want private peering with google you can have it for free, they will not pay for peering with you. I know an example in one of Eu countries in which big ISP wanted google to pay them for private peering, this ISP had around 40% of internet market in this country. Google said no and this isp is peering with google for free now, while charging other companies double digit euro for megabit..

Google has so much private peering around the world that they just don't really care, it will not affect them too much. People will change their ISP to have fast youtube access rather than stop to use youtube or google.

> this ISP had around 40% of internet market in this country

oh I tought it is way more than 40%. well the problem is the other providers are not (that) better options either.

They're hedging their bets. They don't want to alienate half their audience, so they make a token show for the minority that care, and leave it at that.

Also, isn't it likely that the largest companies would benefit most if they were in a position to pay for priority over small upstart competitors?

I didn't even realise it was today until part way through reading this page of comments.

Hacker News -> Noticed the black/grey bar, but assumed it was a variant of the "someone notable has died" black bar so didn't pay it much attention.

Reddit -> Didn't even see the altered logo until probably the tenth page I was on, and just though "Oh, the logo didn't load in all the way, weird" (by the time it gets to the "Bandwidth exceeded" message it's probably off the page, and even that's hardly a call to (user) action).

Google/Twitter/Facebook -> Didn't notice anything.

I was hoping Amazon would do something creative like offering Prime Six-Day Shipping but nope - just some graphic tossed aside so they can keep selling Fire devices.

Well it's certainly made me pause when I saw HN's fancy grey header.

That's perhaps the intention. Raise awareness first, then come together to do something. It's gonna take lots of days of action over the years to gain momentum..

Clearly, this day of action needs more hashtags. Maybe a building to be lit up in different colors tonight. /s

Seriously, I'm disgusted by what counts as "action" these days. This reeks of lip service, nothing more.

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