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Participate in the “Internet Slowdown” with one click

blog.cloudflare.com

108 pointsrdl92 comments

This has to be one of the most useless campaigns. Yet another slactivist 'don't really do anything but damnit feel like you did.'

It doesn't 'raise awareness' (more slactivism). People have heard of Net Neutrality.

This does nothing to educate about it. There is no information here, just Oggie Boogie scary shit might happen (but don't worry we won't risk clicks to show you).

And that's even if you see it. I've been to reddit off and on all morning, I happened to finally notice the very small black box in the corner with the stupid vague message. No idea when it showed up. I was starting to think reddit wasn't even going to bother with a banner. I'm willing to bet most people will be the same way since, again, no one is willing to risk some ad impressions to actually put anyone out.

When your solution to a problem is 'don't really do anything about it' don't be surprised when shit happens.

I agree CISPA/PIPA were better, but that's because it was a much more clear message, and a more clear threat to all big companies.

The sad truth is ending net neutrality actually helps enough big companies (access networks for sure; large content sites who can pay, to reduce the threat from smaller sites...) that it's not going to face the same kind of opposition from tech.

A lot of the same companies that would win with anti net neutrality legislation being passed also supported SOPA/PIPA so I don't see the big tech divided don't do anything angle being applicable.

No one is willing to do anything that would give up ad revenue or clicks.

Shit like this makes donating to the EFF feel like a giant waste of money.

"September 10: The day like every other day we won't inconvenience you, please click our ads."

"People have heard of Net Neutrality."

"People" have, but most of the internet-using population haven't. Not saying this is the best method, but don't be fooled into thinking that everyone is aware of what's going on.

If they weren't, after this they're still won't.

Why? Are you saying the actual popup doesn't communicate the proper information? I said in another comment, my website is for finding and discussing new music. My users certainly don't have to be technical people. It would seem, seeing this message might very well give them some information they've never seen before.

First - When was the last time you read a popup? Hell, who doesn't have a popup blocker now?

Second - This is not information - "Cable companies could make this page so slow, it would still be loading..."

How? Why? What is this about? There is no information there. On top of that, many ISP's already are (people are familiar with throttling regarding their mobile data plan) so this doesn't even say that anything is changing.

Hell, who doesn't have a popup blocker now?

Again: the vast majority of people. Taking things that techies do and extrapolating to the internet population at large never ends well.

Most browsers ship with popup blockers, and they're on by default.

Popup blockers typically don't block pop-overs (in-page HTML elements).

I can't tell you how many posts I saw exactly like yours regarding the Ice Bucket Challenge.

"What good does a glorified wet t-shirt contest do?"

"It's just a bunch of celebrities trying to participate in a pointless meme."

"You're all just a bunch of mindless lemmings. You'll do anything for the attention."

The Ice Bucket Challenge raised $111.1m as of August 19th, according to alsa.org.

You're thinking too broad. Think about what this is: a blog post from a CDN company. Who's the main audience? Tech-savvy people. Tech-savvy people will put this on their site that's most likely for tech-savvy people (who in turn have heard of Net Neutrality and hopefully have contacted their Congressperson about it). Any people who work for companies who have substantial traffic from non-tech-savvy people most likely would not be in a position to implement this near-worthless popup.

Face it, unless Google puts something up on their homepage (they won't), nothing's changing.

Your assumption that the audience for Cloudflare's post is "tech-savvy people" is accurate but your follow-up assumption that the websites that these tech-savvy people make are "most likely" for tech-savvy people is obviously incorrect. The website I built for music. Certainly, my users need not be tech savvy to use my site. So if I installed this popup, there is a good chance of showing it to some non-tech people. I would assume that a lot of people that read HN have built products for non-tech people.

So you're saying there's nothing we can do and we should just keep our heads down and pretend nothing's wrong because there's no way we can compete with big companies and lobbying groups.

Good plan, let me know how that works out.

Saying "this is not useful" is not the same as saying "nothing is useful".

Google may not be tech savvy, but I'm sure some of the tech savvy people reading the blog probably have a wife or non-tech-savvy friend who works at Google. Lots of tech savvy people in the value know at least one or two people at Google.

Is anyone else talking about the ice bucket challenge here?

Net Neutraility, Bandwidth saturation & peering link negotiation is far more complicated than what is being presented by this campaign.

I understand you are passionate about the Ice Bucket Challenge, but I'm afraid you have written what is called a "red herring."

You think anybody that dumped a bucket of ice on their head understands half of the medical science behind ALS? Do you think they honestly needed to? No, they only needed to recognize its importance, and then they further spread awareness and/or donated money to people more qualified than themselves to further champion the cause.

Awareness is the key. Even if people don't understand exactly what it is or why, you have to put it in their face over and over until they take action, whether by inspiration or frustration.

> Net Neutraility, Bandwidth saturation & peering link negotiation is far more complicated than what is being presented by this campaign.

Perhaps the complexity is the problem. I'm fairly tech savvy and when I've never heard a clear explanation of the problem and the solution.

There's a very clear problem with A.L.S.: if you get it, you die within a few years. It's not very hard to understand/sympathize with that.

The clearest explanations for the problem of lack of proper net neutrality are two examples:

1. Slower internet. If companies have to pay twice as much to get a proper connection to their customers, a lot of companies won't be able to.

2. A la carte internet. Pay your ISP $5 more a month for a priority connection to Netflix. Save now with our Social Media Bundle! Only $10 a month for access to Facebook and Twitter!

1. Why don't we have this now?

2. Why should ISPs be forced to provide more bandwidth for some companies at the same price? There are already tiers of service at the consumer level. Why not at the content producer level?

1. Why should a company have to pay an ISP they have no business relationship with.

i.e Netflix gets service from Level3, my ISP is Time Warner. Why should Time Warner get money from Netflix?

2. They're not forced to provide more bandwidth to anyone, but they shouldn't be able to restrict bandwidth to an endpoint to shake them down.

Again, I pay Time Warner for a 50Mbit connection, why can Time Warner say what I can use it for?

> Again, I pay Time Warner for a 50Mbit connection, why can Time Warner say what I can use it for?

At any given moment, there's a fixed amount of bandwidth that can enter and exit TW's network: only so much data between consumers and producers can pass through it. Tiers help you get more guaranteed bandwidth: you're buying some of the pipe. Why shouldn't content producers also have the ability to buy a percentage of that pipe?

When you bought more of the pipe, did it slow down someone else's, or did the ISP realize that it could make/compete more by building out its network, i.e. making the pipe bigger?

I realize monopolies can charge whatever for whatever level of service, but this notion that all ISPs must be forced to conduct their business like a regulated utility in all circumstances just baffles me. Local governments and public utilities are a big part of the lack of competition, but net neutrality advocates rarely address that fact.

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...

If Time Warner is selling more bandwidth than they are able to provide, the correct solution is that they upgrade their infrastructure, not 'here's a 50Mbit connection, you'll pay more than the 20Mbit plan, but you get to use 3Mbit, have a nice day.'

> there's a fixed amount of bandwidth

This is being used as a bullshit excuse, and people buy it because they can visualize a set of physical tubes with a fixed width. However, isn't it funny that when Netflix paid off Comcast, they suddenly found enough bandwidth to stop throttling Netflix traffic back. I guess they got right out there and dug another trench for another tube.

Did you buy a connection to the Time Warner Network, or did you buy a connection to the Internet?

If they can't get external data fast enough for supplying your connection, TW has lied to you, and isn't delivering the service you paid for.

Also, interconnection is not in any way analogue to a pipe. It has no reasonable length they have to keep. It's just a matter of joining the 50Mb "pipe" they sold to you with the pipe the other party sold to the site you are accessing.

> If they can't get external data fast enough for supplying your connection, TW has lied to you, and isn't delivering the service you paid for

Is it really possible that everyone who pays for 50Mbit connection can get M0Mbit/sec directly from Netflix??? Is Netflix really capable of pumping that out of their datacenters?

TW lies about bandwidth as does Apple about battery life and performance. It's all about ideal (impractical) conditions and plain 'ol marketing BS that all the ISPs do.

There are already tiers of service at the "producer" level. Companies can buy more bandwidth for their servers just like "consumers". They can also distribute servers around the globe or even co-locate with ISPs. So, each Comcast user pays for their connection, and Netflix also pays for their bandwidth. But now residential ISPs want to charge Netflix again for delivering their data to customers, even though they're already being paid by both ends.

Why is the reddit box so small? I'm pretty disappointed.

I say the same thing every time I read a "slacktivism" post, but here we go again: if this is useless, what do I actually do to help? Seriously, I'm not posing this as rhetoric.

I've already filed a fairly long, unique comment to the FCC, but I've heard that the FCC ignores most comments unless they come from well-known players.

I donate money monthly to the EFF.

I've signed the letter to the lawmakers on Battle for the Net.

I don't have a personal website, so I can't put up a banner ad.

So, given that I've heard comments on this site and in person that all of the above counts as slacktivism, just makes me feel better, and doesn't contribute to an actual solution, what do I do to influence this issue? Ignoring the possibility of coming into large sums of money and buying myself a congressman of my very own?

Calling or writing letters (not emails!) to congressional representatives is another thing you can do.

FWIW, I think that donating money is pretty real.

Are letters taken more seriously than emails? That's good to know, thanks.

I don't know if they consider it consciously, but it's about the costs to the sender: emails are cheap and easy to fire off. Phone calls and letters a bit less so.

I've spoken to several reps and they say yes.

This is mainly because they get inundated with email. Letters and snail mail? Not so much. You actually have a captive audience to a degree when you send a letter.

As an individual US citizen, that is probably all you can do, though I would call "signed the letter to the lawmakers on Battle for the Net" slacktivism.

Slacktivism is - " "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it take satisfaction from the feeling they have contributed"

Donating money to the EFF, well you would hope it goes to paying the lawyers fighting these things in the court, so you are directly contributing to a practical effect. Comments to the FCC are actually part of the FCC's process, so while they may ignore them, that is the actual way to get your input to the FCC. Even more so when you send a personally written comment instead of filling in a form letter.

On the other hand, click to sign a petition, throw up a banner add, put a little black box on the web page, send a tweet, change your avatar, these do nothing. However because you feel like you did something because you had to change some html or upload some image somewhere people do these instead of anything that would require any real thought.

Oh I don't know, the anti-SOPA campaign worked out pretty well.

Worse than that. The idea that if we don't have net neutrality the internet will suddenly run at dial up speeds is pure hyperbole. Yes, net neutrality is a good thing. Yes, without it will have a certain set of problems associated with it. But simulating a problem that is highly unlikely and annoying is unlikely to get my sympathy and only grudging support.

Reminds me of Critical Mass bicycle protest in San Francisco. As a life long cyclist and general lover of all things bicycle I should support the idea but they are so annoying I find myself pushed in the opposite direction...

Is Critical Mass a protest? I never noticed it being that. I thought it was just a bunch of folks riding? Maybe you just don't like them personally?

As far as I can tell Critical Mass is propaganda of the deed against pedestrians.

Well that's not cool. I don't support that either. In my experience (limited to places I've lived), Critical Mass is more about bicycles in the street with the autos than about bicycles in the sidewalk or crosswalk with pedestrians.

Originally in the 90's it was a protest of "cyclists reclaiming the streets". It may have morphed into something else. Still, causing traffic jams and blocking people from getting home on a Friday evening seems a bit selfish and more annoying than a way of garnering support...

The worst part about Critical Mass is that they can block people who are trying to save a life.

People who are on-call, like doctors and CRNAs and so on, don't get lights and sirens. They just drive normal cars, but if they don't get to the hospital within a certain short amount of time, someone is likely to die.

Critical Mass cyclists have no way of knowing who's on-call and coming in to a hospital. Even if they do make a path for all obvious emergency vehicles, that isn't enough.

Not to mention that just because what someone is doing isn't a matter of life and death doesn't mean it isn't important. Depriving a father of an hour he could have spent with his kids is a pretty screwed up thing to do in general.

I fully agree with you, but if you point the argument that way, CM supporters have an easier time claiming that their protest is more important than someone's day off.

They have a harder time arguing that their protest is more important than a CRNA going in to make an emergency c-section possible, where the lives of a mother and child are at risk, or a surgeon going in to perform an emergency craniotomy on a husband, father, and grandfather who just fell off a ladder.

While that might be true that it won't have much effect on most people, why don't you focus your energy into doing something that you think will make things change instead? Also I don't think most people know what net neutrality is at all at this point.

I'm going to repost what I commented on CloudFlare's blog, since they don't appear to have published it (yes, I was a little angry. I've had to put up with these CAPTCHAs for the last week):

Ha, so much irony, CloudFlare.

The company that is determinedly CAPTCHA-walling as much of the internet as it can get its hands on supports Network Neutrality...? Reeaally?

You support network neutrality, as long as your users don't use Tor. And don't use a VPN. Or any other kind of shared IP. Or have cookies disabled.

No, your support of network neutrality is utterly, utterly shallow. You might pragmatically support it, as it pertains to you not having to pay any more for your data pipes, but you share none of the principles behind it - that all people should have the same access to content.

Oh look - I try to access BattleForTheNet.com: "Please complete the security check. Please enable cookies".

An IP address is not a person. Somehow Twitter, Facebook, Google, can figure this out... Why can't you?

Edit: Also, is anybody else affected by these CAPTCHAs? I can't believe it's just me. Literally half of all news articles and such I try to read, I'm getting CAPTCHA-walled by CloudFlare. It's quite scary to suddenly realise how much control this single company has. (Not to mention incredibly annoying. I've taken to simply avoiding several news sites I used to browse.)

Presumably you are getting CAPTCHA-walled because your shared anonymous IP has a history of abuse? How do you suggest that is tackled?

I can understand not allowing me to post anonymously - but to go as far as refusing me read access? Really?

Actually tackling the problem, hmm. Storing a single cookie on the cloudflare domain so I only have to auth with CloudFlare once, would be better than nothing. I don't like the tracking aspect of that though. Maybe there's some kind of advanced crypto which will solve this in a privacy conscious manner one day.

Unless IPv6 takes off fast more IP addresses are going to be shared. It's simply a terribly crude measure to assume IP address = person.

> I can understand not allowing me to post anonymously - but to go as far as refusing me read access? Really?

Read access still consumes resources - you may want to read up on what "denial of service" means and check your outrage. CloudFlare sits between you and the host server, and it's their responsibility to cut off DoS attacks before it can affect the host server. Their heuristics may not be perfect but it's not exactly a simple problem to solve.

> Read access still consumes resources - you may want to read up on what "denial of service" means and check your outrage. CloudFlare sits between you and the host server, and it's their responsibility to cut off DoS attacks before it can affect the host server. Their heuristics may not be perfect but it's not exactly a simple problem to solve.

It's hardly rocket science to determine when a DoS attack is occurring based on the overall traffic level. And until it is there is no need for countermeasures.

Blocking of read access is not something I've often experienced before, and certainly not at this scale. Usually it's just one admin blocking an IP here and there, but now, with this job outsourced... To be able to impede an IP from accessing such a huge swathe of sites is a unique and new innovation, and a scary centralisation of power.

The ability to block threats is far greater, sure, but so too is the potential for collateral damage.

Your blog comment has been posted; we don't moderate things that are criticism (or anger) only spam. But the moderator does need to be awake.

As the for CAPTCHA problem you are seeing, having you tried contacting CloudFlare Support about it? We can look at the IP you are coming from and see what's happening.

> having you tried contacting CloudFlare Support about it?

I could do - but I'm kind of angry that I even have to. What about the less technically literate, who might barely know what CloudFlare is, let alone figure out how to contact their support? (Yes, I use a VPN, but there's plenty of ways a non tech person might have a shared IP.) And why should I have to go to this effort, just to get read access to a website?

And what if I'm on a different IP tomorrow? Begging for my IP to be unblocked is no long term solution. (What about when malicious activity comes from it tomorrow, after you unblocked it? You'll just block it again.)

Just now, in my other browser tab:

>Please complete the security check to access coinmarketcap.com

(btw, Disqus is giving you different comments depending on whether https or not, that's why I missed my comment being published.)

Not technically literate enough to contact cloudflare support but using TOR or a VPN is an interesting combination.

You missed:

> there's plenty of ways a non tech person might have a shared IP

e.g. some mobile internet, university/school campuses, workplaces, shared wifi points. All of which might have some abuse. I guess perhaps not the amount of a VPN/Tor.

That being said, there's more people than ever using Tor lately. And I'm sure CloudFlare are more than aware of Tor already. And lots of relatively casual users signing up for VPNs to get to blocked file sharing sites etc.

Just now, in my other tab:

> Please complete the security check to access torrentfreak.com

> Not technically literate enough to contact cloudflare support but using TOR

It's more likely than you think:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

http://piratebrowser.com/

All someone needs is to have read something on some social media website, followed a link, and installed some software. Boom, they're accessing the Internet through TOR.

I'm asking because I work for CloudFlare and specifically I'm about to start working on the reputation system that deals with things like the CAPTCHA that you are seeing. So, I'm personally interested in understanding what you are seeing because we should not be blocking people who are legitimate.

If you don't feel like contacting CloudFlare Support you could always just email me directly: jgc (you guess the domain name :-)

In the spirit of hopefully improving things, I'll contact support.

It's still scary the power your company has, mind.

Let them know that I told you to contact them.

<rant>

To expand on the CAPTCHA problem, I had to complete a CAPTCHA to go to torrentfreak.com.

I got nothing where the CAPTCHA box should have been ([0]). After some time, I refreshed and got [1]. I wrote the CAPTCHA, was given a large bunch of text ([2]) and I copied it to the input field right below. Then, I submitted the form but it still didn't work (would just bring me to the CAPTCHA again). I guess this form of CAPTCHA is for JS-less browsers, but apparently it doesn't work. I had to enable JS for both TorrentFreak, Cloudflare and Google (reCAPTCHA) in order to make show the CAPTCHA and be able to contine.

The above happened right now. It also happened with Reddit (except [0]) a week ago or so. This is all on a vanilla (i.e. no addons) TBB.

[0]: https://i.minus.com/ibeweNVEUJF5eF.png

[1]: https://i.minus.com/ilKn4GHj3VGvO.png

[2]: https://i.minus.com/iqYClN4WabBPo.png

Edit: Fixed images.

</rant>

I'm actually working with Tor Project to fix the captcha/etc. problem; it's not intentional, and we're trying to figure out a way to special case Tor exit nodes and other shared IPs to prevent accidental blocking.

(We have the advantage of only really caring about http/https through Tor, so we can do more advanced heuristics for abuse, blocking URLs, etc.)

There's something baffling about making a strong stand for net neutrality while promoting the heavily centralized web. Cloudflare seems like a neat company, and I enjoy their technical posts here and elsewhere very much, but the phenomenon they represent is just as harmful to the web as the object of this protest.

Unfair! They are providing a damn good service in the current paradigm. They are standing up for something important in a reasonable way. Decentralisation will be the next great hurdle, I'm sure we've all been thinking about it for a while now - no need to dismiss those trying to get something done before then.

Google provides damned good email services in the "current paradigm" while operating essentially as the vanguard of the centralized Internet.

The whole net neutrality debate is an artifact of centralization. It wouldn't exist without near-monopoly ISPs and very large companies that dominate online traffic. From that perspective, fighting for net neutrality is papering over a more fundamental problem.

You could make an argument that CloudFlare is centralization, but you could ALSO make an argument that CloudFlare, by letting smaller sites continue self-hosting but using CloudFlare for scaling, is also more decentralized than the realistic alternatives.

I'd ALSO prefer a world where everyone can get 10G to the home/office, great power, and global anycast with a bunch of sites around the world, from an infinity of vendors without strong content controls. Unfortunately, the alternatives to CloudFlare-like services seem to be:

1) Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc. -- if you're popular or controversial, this isn't great.

2) Hosting with large global entities (AWS, Google, etc.) with much more restrictive content policies, and with greater control over the technical stack you use.

3) Setting a pretty high floor for cost or technical competence to host a site (you're a clear outlier on the technical competence side in 2014, with colo'd boxes. sadly)

I love being able to spin up a random VM on my personal colo'd hardware, behind CloudFlare, and know it can deal with attacks or load; it would cost me a lot to build every random thing entirely on its own.

There are some potential issues with using CloudFlare for certain kinds of sites (turning over SSL keys, for instance, if you want us to handle your https traffic), but we have technical solutions to those, some of which we've presented over the past year, such as "keyless ssl", where you continue to retain custody of the private key and we just ask you every time we need to open a session to a new user.

It's not a perfect solution, but I think using CloudFlare is actually the best available choice for a lot of sites, and we're trying to make it better all the time.

And yes -- the end of Net Neutrality probably wouldn't hurt CloudFlare very much; it would arguably make it harder to run a site without it, or without going to some kind of provider who has also negotiated with the access networks. This isn't really a commercial decision so much as a "we like the free Internet and support it" decision.

Inability to resist DDoS/traffic surges/etc.

I heard a rumour[1] that you guys drop users on smaller plans when they get hit. Supposedly people get an e-mail

WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED?

CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites. Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website under attack to avoid network degradation.

and they're on their own. Is it true?

[1] http://www.webhostingtalk.pl/topic/49090-cloudflare-polski-o...

I don't know if it's true or not, but given that they've paid nothing, doesn't that seem perfectly fair?

Just like there's no such thing as "unlimited data storage" there isn't really such a thing as "unlimited DDoS protection." I assume there's SOME limits on how much you get with a free or even $20 plan. I can only imagine what the companies that specialize in DDoS protection charge.

Sure. But if protection starts at $200/mo (CloudFlare Business) then it's not really for smaller sites with a controversial opinion. For $200 you can get two dedicated servers with DDoS protection on top.

2 dedicated servers might buy you ~3-4GB/s of DDoS protection. Cloudflair's base model protects from around 100GB/s, which what commonly takes banks offline (Bank of American, or Chase be taken down with ~70GB/s).

They gave talk at defcon21 about migrating a 300-400GB/s DDoS (Roughly 1.25% of all internet traffic in the US at the time was that DDoS).

When you start getting into DDoS's >300GB/s your DDoS will start causing issues for providers, and backbone companies, not just Cloudflair.

I didn't mean going at it alone with two rented boxes but rather a service provided by your operator with the rental like http://www.soyoustart.com/en/anti-ddos.xml

Gb everywhere you said GB, just to be fair (gigabits per second, not gigabytes per second)

It's fortunate that Cloudflare don't have a monopoly on serving HTTP content with DDoS protection in that case, although perhaps they do have a monopoly on providing those services for free.

We also give free service to various NGOs/activist groups/etc at the "we accept huge DDoS and won't shut you off level" -- https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo FWIW

Calling Cloudflare decentralized because it's not as big or strict as AWS is a really weak definition of decentralized.

My criticism is fundamentally structural. No matter how great a company CloudFlare might be right now, we shouldn't be creating single-company points of failure for big pieces of the Internet.

The net today is full of small-to-medium hosting providers like Linode, in a variety of locations, that offer a good balance between technical complexity and ease of setup and use. It is not obvious to me why this all needs to sit behind a centrally-controlled CDN, however enlightened.

I also think your fear of DDoS is exaggerated, at least for personal sites and sites on my scale (thousands of users).

I'd rather see some popular websites participate with editing their webserver to throttle the FCC : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 for more information (If you have Nginx, Apache, MaxCDN)

Currently, it throttles to model (28,8 kb/s) speeds when someone connects with an FCC IP.

If you are throttling the FCC, add your list to the new HN post on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296608 - Update your servers, do something!

Why just the FCC? Why not the Congress and the Whitehouse as well?

Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all their users?

In reality I'm mostly sad that the campaign is purely USA ("contact your rep" - I don't have a "rep", it doesn't work that way here), but if I see it on any app that knows where I'm located, I'll know that the owners' world ends at their country borders and that I'm a second class user.

> Why would any global app show an American national political campaign to all their users?

Because it affects them, too, and they have a right to know what the risks are, even if they can't do anything to help very directly.

I bet a huge number of users that see this popup are just going to react with "Oh, another bloody advert... piss off" and click the X. It has too much similarity to the "Speed up your PC now! Make Internet faster!" sort of ads, so I think it'll get ignored in the same way.

Then again, those ads wouldn't exist if they weren't effective...

Right after telling Cloudflare all about who visits your websites. Please only show this to US americans, it would be weird to slap this in the face of the majority of the world population.

If you're a current customer, you already trust us with your logs. We've got a good track record of fighting for user privacy, and IMO if you wanted to get records of a site's visitors, you'd probably go directly to the site if at all possible -- smaller sites generally aren't in a position to fight subpoenas and letters, whereas we do.

(disclaimer: I work at CloudFlare after selling my crypto startup to them earlier in the year, and work on security/privacy products)

I agree it's kind of unfair to non-USA people to suffer website slowdowns over US politics. It's also unfair for non-USA people to get spied on by NSA or droned by CIA. Unfortunately they don't ask me :)

  > As we’ve seen that bandwidth pricing is not reflective of the
  > underlying fair market value when Internet service providers have
  > monopolistic control,

Where was the fair market value of bandwidth presented/derived? I did not see it on the page submitted or the page linked to in the excerpt.

It's a reference to http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-ar...

i.e. telstra extracting monopoly rents by being a monopoly, vs. the otherwise prevailing price.

I agree it's difficult to treat bandwidth as a true commodity, especially when there's a monopoly, but I think it's clear that if Australia weren't Telstra's victim, bandwidth prices would be far lower.

re Internet Slowdown: I'm stuck on a dissonance between the status as presented vs. the reality as I understand it. I may well be wrong/uninformed and I'm happy to be educated if so.

Here's the status as presented:

"Battleforthenet.com (a project of Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, Fight for the Future, and Free Press) has organized a day of protest against the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online. Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible."

Here's my 2 points of dissonance:

1. "...FCC proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online."

a) the FCC proposal is about allowing Internet providers to optionally provide higher speed/quality access for a fee, not about "charging" fees "to provide access".

b) There's nothing stopping Internet providers from doing this right now, since the original FCC net neutrality regs were shot down by the courts. So saying the FCC proposal would "allow" them to do it is not accurate, as they are "allowed" to do it right now.

So, as far as I know, the correct statement would be:

"... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online."

2. "Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible."

From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content.

> "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online."

In the context of government regulation "allow" and "not disallow" mean the same thing. But "allow" implies letting monopoly ISPs get away with doing something wrong while "not disallow" implies avoiding unwarranted government interference. You can hardly fault them for their language choice there.

And there is very little practical difference between "access" and the lack of "higher quality/speed" necessary for the service to be used. Netflix at four frames per second is hardly "access to Netflix."

> From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content.

Again, these things are equivalent. There is no difference between "slow down" and "not speed up" in practice. It has the identical result, you're just using different words.

There's no difference between "allow" and "not disallow"? There's a huge difference.

"Allow" means to affirmatively allow ISPs to charge fees when they couldn't before, while "not disallow" means to not put new regulations in place stopping ISPs from charging fees.

"You can hardly fault them for their language choice" -- to me it's much more than a language choice, it's saying something correctly or incorrectly, realistically or framed in some other reality.

And if saying it correctly "implies avoiding unwanted government interference", does that justify saying it incorrectly? Do the ends justify the means? Is propaganda OK if it's for a cause we believe in?

An analogous discussion for "slow down/make inaccessible" vs. "not speed up". There's no difference between these things? I think there's a huge difference. If I'm a company that doesn't pay the fee, will I get the same service I did before, or will I be slowed down/cut off?

As I read the proposed FCC regs, it's pay-for-speedup rather than don't-pay-and-get-slowed-down. But this "Internet slowdown day" campaign is explicitly saying that sites will get slowed down. How do I reconcile these two things?

> "Allow" means to affirmatively allow ISPs to charge fees when they couldn't before, while "not disallow" means to not put new regulations in place stopping ISPs from charging fees.

How is that a difference? The result of both is identical: The ISPs won't be permitted to charge fees.

Look at it in a different context. Because of a technicality in the wording of a statute, all existing traffic laws are found unconstitutional. The legislature introduces a bill that reinstates most of the traffic laws in a way which is constitutional but the bill doesn't reinstate the prohibition against driving while intoxicated. Are you really claiming that someone who points out that the bill "allows driving drunk" is incorrect? At best you're being incredibly pedantic.

> An analogous discussion for "slow down/make inaccessible" vs. "not speed up". There's no difference between these things? I think there's a huge difference. If I'm a company that doesn't pay the fee, will I get the same service I did before, or will I be slowed down/cut off?

In the presence of sufficient capacity no packets are dropped and there is no fast lane or slow lane. The only way to have a fast lane is to have insufficient capacity and then allocate the existing capacity in preference to the fast lane at the expense of the slow lane. The result is to slow down the people who don't pay the fee.

I would say the pedantry is on the other foot. :)

Your drunk driving analogy is strained to say the least. Net neutrality has not been in effect though all of ISP history, except for a brief period before the courts shot it down. To compare that to a hypothetical drunk driving law scenario is way off the mark. It's much closer to reality, as opposed to pedantry, to say that the new regulations don't disallow the ISPs from charging fees, because for almost all of history, there was no regulation about this.

Regarding fast/slow lane, you are making two logic errors. One, implicitly assuming it's a zero-sum game, when it's not. The FCC's intent is to incent ISPs to increase capacity so they can allocate that capacity for new (paid) services. Not to slow down existing clients. Two, assuming we are just talking about bandwidth. Quality of service in all its aspects could be on the table for paid services. Bandwidth alone is not sufficient for good streaming.

I wish these were hidden for non-US ips. I don't care about US issues and even if I did there's nothing I could do.

This doesn't work on my site. Perhaps a javascript issue. Tried it temporarily, disabled.

Nah.

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