
Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane - henryaym
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-demo-slow-lane.html
======
loup-vaillant
But we _already_ have such a slow lane. And it _already_ made the internet
less free and less useful.

It's the upload bandwidth.

Weak upload effectively killed peer to peer. File sharing is slower than it
could be, and e-mail, chat, blogs… are all in the "Cloud". Very convenient,
but also dangerous (insert random EFF or FSF argument here —they all apply).

With a worthy upload bandwidth, all these things could use a server at home,
with many advantages for choice, control, privacy… You could argue it's
impractical for a lambda user (and it is), but that's not the problem. If
someone try to sell a simple server with a fantastic UX that host e-mail,
blog, vlog, social network, and distributed encrypted backup, all out of the
box, it would still suck because of the damn bandwidth —and firewalls in some
cases. So, this business model is dead in the water, which is why it is still
so dammed difficult to install one's own mail server.

You want net neutrality? Start with a neutral bandwidth. Stop treating users
like consumers, and they may stop acting like ones. With any luck, it should
kill YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Skype… except the users will
still do what these "services" offer.

~~~
Timmmmbob
To be fair that was for technical reasons, and I think it will change soon
with fibre. They tend to have sane upload speeds, e.g. 10 Mb/s.

~~~
loup-vaillant
In France, the cheapest fibre is Gb, symmetric. Yet they want to sell us 100Mb
download, 10Mb upload. Also, many are reluctant to give us a decent IPv6: many
give us a /128, instead of the recommended /48, or just the bare minimum /64\.
The technical reasons are long gone by now.

The whole debacle may have _started_ for technical reasons, but I suspect now
they're just addicted to centralization. Maybe tighter control of the end user
leads to more money down the line?

------
alandarev
Issue is severe, but the proposed solution does not sound efficient in any
way. In comparison to blackout day:

1\. Turning site off is a lot easier than installing apache module and
configuring it. What if site admin does not even have root access?

2\. Customer getting the slow site load might not get the message, but instead
turn around for a competitor. [1]

[1] 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. -
[http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-
time/](http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

~~~
wiremine
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.

~~~
3rd3
The iframes idea is a really good one because it wouldn't require changes to
the web server configuration. The throttle could simply be simulated with
delayed loading using JavaScript.

------
addisonj
How about something simpler - Make images load slowly using JS.

A ton of popular consumer sites - facebook, instagram, reddit/imgur are hugely
image based. A few lines of JS to make them slowly load (perhaps PNG artifacts
for bonus points) and you could very effectively get the point across all
while quickly serving a nice large banner.

Offtopic: As a google fiber customer myself, his mention of not remembering
the upload speed, made me think of how we need bandwidth to get to the point
where it doesn't matter. CPU speed used to be something you quoted. For the
last few computers, I don't care anymore, because its simply "enough". I fear
the current telco/ISPs wouldn't agree with that idea...

~~~
arh68
Remember the days before PNG, before JPEG, when GIFs loaded _several times
over_? That sure was fun, watching the image get slightly clearer and clearer
and then just stop, leaving you wondering about that final level of detail.

Back then of course you'd be opening an image _that_ big & detailed in a
separate window, but now we've got some image-heavy websites with dozens of
these things. Retina screens don't make things easier, either. Loading 12
pseduo-GIFS _in serial_ would be the mind-killer. My imgur? Facebook?

Serious question: would it be _evil_ for Google to push out an 'educational
patch' to Chrome? Firefox probably wouldn't.

~~~
timthorn
They didn't load several times over, they loaded progressively. It was all the
same file, but as soon as one level of detail could be displayed, it would - a
very sensible optimisation in dial-up days.

------
shubb
Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet?

I can think of a few - Netflix and Skype would work better.

Most likely, we'd be able to pay for priority traffic, just like we pay for a
large AWS instance. Non-priority traffic might be cheaper than current
bandwidth.

It would be crazy to suggest all sites be forced to use the same size AWS
instance...

Some types of traffic are bandwidth sensitive, like video. Others are cost
sensitive, like Linux DVD images.

If you think that an end to neutrality will 'ruin the internet', don't you
expect consumers to choose ISPs and services that don't do it?

~~~
revelation
You are burning an artificial technical straw-man. There is no _technical_
capacity limit at play here. Networking technology has leapfrogged the
bandwidth available to consumers many times over, and to boot, it is pretty
much infinitely scalable.

So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent
simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is
damaged, and ISPs can feel free to prioritize traffic at that time, we
certainly have the technology to do that.

But what is certainly not ok is slowing traffic because you are not willing to
invest into your connectivity, investing not even enough to actually deliver
all of the meagre bandwidth (100 Mbit is 1995 vintage technology, where in the
US can you even get that?) you have sold to consumers.

~~~
danieldk
_There is no technical capacity limit at play here._

This. The US market is ripe for disruption or regulation. Sure, if you live
remotely in Arizona, it may be hard to get a fat pipe, but it seems that even
most cities have outrageous prices.

I currently live in Germany. We have 150MBit downstream, 5 MBit upstream, plus
phone and television for 40 Euro per month. When we lived in The Netherlands
we were on 130 MBit downstream internet. Even in the stone age (2004) we had
20MBit downstream DSL for 20 Euro per month. Since downloading music and
movies was legal in the Netherlands until recently, many families were
saturating their connections. Netflix is not that demanding in comparison.

The current situation in the EU shows that it is possible to get high-speed
low-cost internet with net neutrality.

~~~
shubb
Strikes me folks here are really complaining about a broken cable market, made
up of local monopolies.

I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described -
the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively
blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.

Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will
charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I
think net neutrality is the least of your problems.

------
keerthiko
This would be great and informative and effective, except that the most
visible sites* have no incentive to play along with this little song and
dance, as they are the ones proliferating anti-net-neutrality for their own
private gain.

So it will basically just look to people like I'm running a shitty technical
job serving my site, most people will think I'm stupid, they won't learn a
damn thing about net neutrality or why it's important, and stop visiting my
site in the process. =/

* that many people use exclusively with their internet-time, like Youtube, facebook, Netflix, etc

~~~
scrabble
Netflix is "proliferating anti-net-neutrality"? They seem to be actively and
publicly pushing for net neutrality.

~~~
pas
They want to maximize profits. So keeping costs down is important, but it's
even more important to keep competitors out of the game.

Currently they have no serious competitors, so they see the Comcast-tax as a
pure added cost. But if this practice goes big and becomes an added cost to
the market, barriers to enter it become higher, which keeps their position
entrenched.

Of course this would require a lot of formalisation (and quantization,
estimating numbers, times and potential competition and market evolution) but
still, most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.

~~~
Karunamon
>Currently they have no serious competitors

Prime video. Hulu.

>most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.

Conjecture. Contrary to populist belief, not every corporation is a soulless,
amoral entity. Netflix has yet to demonstrate _in even the smallest way_ that
they are for anything but complete neutrality.

~~~
Jtsummers
Indeed, it's hugely to their benefit to be for net neutrality these days. A
non-neutral internet would drive up costs for them and/or their customers for
the data connection. If it drives up their costs it eats into their profit
margin and they either soak it or raise prices. If it raises customer costs as
a general increase on broadband cost, then customers have less money to spend
on Netflix and other services. If it drives up customer costs because they now
have to pay a Netflix prioritization fee, then they might not choose Netflix
at all when Mediacom/TWC/Cox/whoever is offering a cheaper streaming media
service.

------
rubbingalcohol
I am working with Fight for the Future on a JavaScript code snippet (called
'Slow Lane') to simulate a slow loading process + rip the FCC a new one. This
project needs to launch next week to make the maximum impact and we need help
to make it superb! If anyone with web skills is interested in helping out,
please email team@fightforthefuture.org or me directly at
jeff@rubbingalcoholic.com ...

------
exelius
I don't know that this is the solution (or even that there's a problem). I
know my opinion isn't very popular on HN on this issue; but I continue to
share it because I feel it's important that people understand the view from
the other side of the fence. I expect to get downvoted because people disagree
with me, but then magical internet points never really mattered much to me.

I think all this talk of the "slow lane" is a bit tinfoil-hat. Companies like
Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic; in fact they do a
lot of QoS to make web browsing faster and more responsive. This type of
traffic (DNS, HTTP requests, online gaming, etc.) tends to get put in a high-
priority QoS class: the data transmitted is often small and it greatly
improves the user's experience. ISPs have a huge incentive to make this type
of traffic as responsive as possible; and given the low bandwidth
requirements, this should definitely be possible. It makes their service
"feel" faster to the customer and it's the right thing to do for the customer.

Video streaming services are another story. They don't need to be responsive
because they pre-cache a lot of data; in fact the right thing to do from a
technical perspective is QoS them into the basement. Video can handle this;
it's high bandwidth and low latency. The thing is, streaming video accounts
for about 80% of peak Internet traffic. A small percentage of users (~30%) are
starting to overload the ISP's last-mile networks with video traffic.

The types of high-bandwidth scenarios that the ISPs will be pushing the "fast
lane" on are going to be almost exclusively video streaming services. Video
streamers have had to pay CDNs for years anyway if they wanted their videos to
stream quickly. The idea is that because these services have such a
disproportionate effect on bandwidth usage, they need to contribute
economically to avoid a tragedy of the commons [1] situation. Your average
website or app that's not pulling 1.5+ mbit/s over an extended period of time
is likely going to be fast regardless because it's in the ISPs best interests
to make it that way.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

~~~
devcpp
>Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic

Yeah? How about money?

As a comms engineer, I too think about the technical implications of this.

But you have to remember that the people who push for the abolition of net
neutrality are mainly the finances guys, i.e the ones responsible for bringing
as much money as possible to the company. And when you put yourself in their
shoes, all of a sudden you get dreams of Comcast turning the Internet into the
same kind of market it has in cable television. And you very quickly forget
about QoS, bandwidth, latency and the job of "delivering the bits" and just
think in terms of profits. You wouldn't know what most of those terms mean
anyway...

~~~
exelius
Well, in short, any web site with any money to pay the ISPs is likely already
running on a CDN that's been paying the ISPs for a decade. The portion of that
market that's not yet monetized is likely very small. Besides, slowing down
general-purpose web traffic makes it look like your service just totally sucks
ass.

But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty.
There's almost no cost for them to just QoS the low-bandwidth stuff up and it
makes people think their service is better.

~~~
orthecreedence
> But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty

Exactly, so people will just leave that ISP and sign up with one that doesn't
throttle traffic. Except most people have only one ISP in their area. Yay free
market!

~~~
exelius
Even in a truly free market, most areas would only have one ISP. See how
Verizon and AT&T have dramatically scaled back or stopped their FiOS/U-Verse
rollout plans. If a company with easements and existing infrastructure (and
thus lower costs) has decided it can't justify the investment, how would
anyone else?

~~~
orthecreedence
I was saying "Yay free market" as in "a truly free market is a bad idea as
seen by local ISP monopolies," not as in "our free market has failed us and
needs to be freer."

In a truly free market, there would be one company that owns everything,
including infrastructure. Not a world I'd like to live in.

------
iLoch
I think simulated slowness is probably better than actual slowness. Something
like a javascript file you could include that would hide all the content on
the page and show each element at the same speed you'd see with a throttled
network. That way you could still display a message about why it's happening,
etc. and it's much easier for the average developer to implement.

------
Killah911
Disclosure: I'm a Feld fanboy. I think it's a brilliant idea. However, to
actually coordinate it would take some doing. Blackouts are relatively easy
technically. Slowdowns, not so much, given that most companies that give a
crap work diligently to improve the user experience and speed things up.

The financial impact could potentially be huge (as I'm sure blackout was as
well). But what's even tougher about this idea is getting companies like
Google and Netflix in on the "simulation". They're most likely not going to be
on the slow lane. Now let's say some we get a whole bunch of startups who
would get penalized by the slow lane to do this for a day. Would it make as
much of a difference to the masses? The initial effects will be subtle, but
the long term impact on economic activity and startups in general could be
devastating.

That being said... if this movement is to take hold we'll need some web server
plugins and some JS magic to help it happen at a massive scale. Maybe some of
my fellow geeks at the bigCo's can convince them to join in for a day too, for
the sake of all of us.

------
bluedino
Apple has included the Network Link Conditioner in the past few versions of
Xcode. Works great for simulating slow network for your apps.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/WhyNetworkingIsHard/WhyNetworkingIsHard.html)

------
esquivalience
Seems to me that this protest would have a far higher impact than the blackout
- or at least a far higher annoyance factor.

The services it would impact most are high-bandwidth such as content
streaming, but of course those may be reluctant to participate as it could
realistically ruin their goodwill and quickly decimate their user base.

------
yodaiken
Here's v1 of slowlane.js, might be able to help:
[https://github.com/yodaiken/slowlane/](https://github.com/yodaiken/slowlane/)

------
Zelphyr
I really like this idea except for one thing; it would show users a comparison
of slow (what they get now) and _really_ slow. But not what they would get if
they lived in, say, Seoul.

The problem is, most people don't realize that, all things considered, their
internet really isn't as fast as it could be. They think it is because they
have no basis for comparison. And the ISP's bank on this... literally.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
That's what burns me. We already pay ISPs to deliver the data that we request.
They should take our money and improve their infrastructure. Instead, they
want to get paid again, by e.g. Netflix, and the result would _still_ be
basically the same shitty third-world service we get in the US today.

Many of us _already_ get a Slow Lane Demo every day during "prime time"
evening hours.

------
sharemywin
I'm thinking this is a false advertising issue. they say they provide X speed
and throttle it down. we need to get the attorney generals in on this issue.
they should only be able to advertise the slowest speed they throttle down to.

------
keithpeter
_" Algorithmically, all sites could slow themselves down dramatically,
demonstrating what performance might look like over a 1/1 pipe. Or even a
0.5/0.5 pipe."_

If the former, it would make precisely _no difference_ to me. Openreach (UK)
provide adsl over copper via an older phone exchange in my immediate area.
This is one mile from the centre of a major city. The local authority actually
took Openreach to court and lost.

To put this into perspective the government is about to spend around UKP60
Billions over 20 years to provide a high speed train link to London so the
journey time drops from 1h30 to 45 min...

------
Zhenya
I can't wait till I have to buy packages based on the type of content I want
to consume : $10/month email $20/web $30/music $60/ video. Bonus Package - Add
$5 for gaming $20 for large file download.

/S

This is where we are heading.

------
TeMPOraL
Late to the discussion about the general issue; could someone please help me
understand what's the difference between the "Fast Lane"/"Slow Lane" and good
old QoS?

~~~
k3liutZu
It basically is QoS. But out of your control. And in favor of the highest
bidder.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Was QoS ever under my control? I can manage things up to my router, but not
upstream from it. (IANAS, I Am Not A Sysadmim)

------
carlosvergara
One quick, effective and probably not entirely illegal manner to raise the
issue would simply be putting a sign on top of any comcast user's pageview
saying something like, "Since your internet provider has forced us to pay X
amount of money per GB to provide our service to your specific account, and we
currently haven't figured out a cost scheme to account for that, your movie
viewing experience is being adjusted to fit our current costs. (hyperlink)Tell
Comcast how you feel about this."

~~~
orthecreedence
"Dear customer 5281132821292,

Thank you for writing to Comcast. At this time, your wishes are of no concern
to us because we have a monopoly in your area.

Best, Comcast Consumer Relations"

------
segmondy
A class action lawsuit is overdue against these internet providers over
selling. I feel like I'm on a 128k ISDN most days, it's literally that slow.
When you call in, they say, well, "Up to 3Mps" doesn't mean you will get it.
ISPs are charging us by possible speeds, they need to deliver or discount when
they can't. if you promise me about 10-15 widgets an hour for $50 and all you
can consistently deliver for a month is 2-3 widgets. You should not demand
$50.

------
DanBC
Would users actually notice?

And, really, users who have bought based on price per Mb download speed
without any other metric are partly to blame for this. If users had been
honestly buying based on bandwidth used we would not have ISPs offering
"unlimited (until you hit the limits)" internet connectivity. (This is not to
excuse the ISPs for their sleazy misleading advertising).

Give people a price per GB and then tell them how many GB they download each
month. Price that GB sensibly and route traffic fairly.

------
digikata
I think a better demo would be a game where you're playing the ISP trying to
maximize the profits from captive neighborhoods of customers. There could be
activities such as offering a toll gate speed-up packages for popular
websites, and placing your former lobbyist as a regulatory officer, and buying
up more ISPs to get more captive neighborhoods.

------
coreymgilmore
One main problem with any attempt by a site to slow down its service is that
all similar/competitor sites must slow down equally. Otherwise we get the game
of one site provider not slowing down (or slowing down as much) because of the
incentive: if they are faster, they generate more visits than competitors.

~~~
josho
The article, as I understand it, suggested a banner on the site stating why
the site is slow, and to get out of the slow lane 'click here'.

------
ctdonath
_What if we did the same by Demoing the Slow Lane for a day._

As someone who remembers using 110bps connections, this is amusing.

------
solnyshok
two can play this game. Netflix could serve B&W versions of movies to the
clients of non-neutral providers. The official line could be something along
"this movie have been optimized for the low bandwith connections by removing
colors and stereo sound; contact your congressmen"

------
cddotdotslash
Best idea I've heard so far is to intentionally slow traffic only for known
government IP blocks. If we can convince Google, Wikipedia, and other big
sites to do this, Washington would definitely notice. I'm thinking of writing
a script that site owners could use to do just this.

~~~
orthecreedence
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712345)

You may want to get in touch with rubbingalcoholic/FFTF and see if you can
help out!

I've demoed the widget they're working on and it's painfully awesome.

~~~
cddotdotslash
Thanks! I sent them an email. If anyone else is reading this later, my code is
here:
[https://gist.github.com/matthewdfuller/69f990f58f1e0850443e](https://gist.github.com/matthewdfuller/69f990f58f1e0850443e)

It's pure JS and simulates the old dial-up-style loading of pages.

------
alexkiritz
How about we block comcast and the fcc from accessing google. See how they
like it.

------
ihsw
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?

~~~
knappe
We see this already with blackout outs in cable TV for various sports games
ect.

In fact, it took 4 months to resolve a dispute between DirecTV and the Weather
Channel [0], which affected 20 Million people. There was _some_ outrage, but
not enough to for DirecTV to relent. Instead, the content provider was forced
to change [1].

There are lessons to be learned here for other content providers, like
Netflix. My worry is that the gatekeepers still hold too much power and are
strong arming content providers, using consumers as pawns.

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-
et-c...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-
directv-weather-channel-deal-20140408-story.html) [1]
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/04/08/weather-
cha...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/04/08/weather-channel-cuts-
reality-shows-in-directv-deal/7472653/)

~~~
danielweber
You have the sports blackout backwards. The content producer has demanded the
blackout, not the gatekeeper, which would be happy to have the viewers.

~~~
knappe
Blackouts occur as a negotiation between local channels and the regional
broadcasters (gate keepers), in general, such that local channels get priority
over regional broadcasters.

Here is an example of a gatekeeper forcing blackouts the other way around [0].
The content producer was required to enforce a blackout on local channels as
part of the deal with the gate keeper. Net result? Consumers lose.

[0]
[http://articles.philly.com/2014-03-27/news/48599544_1_philli...](http://articles.philly.com/2014-03-27/news/48599544_1_phillies-
games-comcast-cable-sports-games)

------
bitJericho
Much more effective would be for operators to ban ISPs. Imagine the internet
telling specific users that they have to get off comcast or whatever in order
to use their service for a particular day out of every month. Do it maddox
style with a nice middle finger. Make users want to switch instead of just
pretend like there's no alternatives.

~~~
TheCraiggers
>Much more effective would be for operators to ban ISPs.

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.

>Make users want to switch

That's great if there are alternatives to switch to.

Yes, I could technically switch to dialup. It is _technically_ internet. It's
not going to allow me to do any work or any of my hobbies, however. So I don't
consider it a valid option.

Yes, I could also try out some kind of dish provider. If I wanted to chop down
some trees. Besides, those also don't work for me (almost no upload bandwidth,
and horrible latency issues).

>instead of just pretend like there's no alternatives.

I live in an area where Comcast literally is my only option for high-speed
internet. I'm not pretending.

~~~
bitJericho
> 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?

~~~
TheCraiggers
Lets say each website / server admin blacklisted various ISPs from their
servers because they did something the admin didn't like. Maybe they noticed
throttling to/from their site, or spam, or just had such a bad experience once
as their customer that they now considered that ISP to be "bad for the
internet".

What would we end up with? Most of the internet not working for anybody.
Friends sending you links that you can't get to because you're on different
ISPs. Needing to buy service at more than one ISP to "provide coverage". If it
happened on a large enough scale, it would unravel what we know as the
internet.

This is what I mean when I say it's a bad idea.

~~~
bitJericho
I'm talking about a protest movement, not a permanent solution.

------
neals
You slow down HN and Reddit and I'll be up in arms with a burning pitchfork
and a sharp spiked cross.

------
hmottestad
This blog has now made it to my global blocking file for serving the entire
post as an image file instead of as text.

~~~
davidbarker
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.

~~~
hmottestad
Yeah, seems to be something stupid they are doing when serving to mobile
devices.

~~~
davidbarker
It also looks similar (like it's scaled-up) on my retina MBP, but the text is
selectable.

