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.
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.