September 10th is the Internet Slowdown
This is a major effort to save Net Neutrality from those who would destroy it for their own personal and corporate gains, and yes, it is the Battle for the Net. The most powerful ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) are bringing heavy corporate forces to bear in order to "sway" the FCC into removing the level playing field which has always been the backbone of the Internet, known as Net Neutrality. This is something that the average PC and Internet user is NOT GOING TO ENJOY and will in fact serve only to detriment the experience of using the 'Net.
To understand exactly what this means, let's start with a few simple facts: Your ISP (Internet Service Provider), whomever that may be controls your Internet connection speed, and can control the connections of any websites to which connections are made through the servers, routers, NAPs (Network Access Points) etc. which they own, rent, or lease and can manipulate. You yourself can make changes akin to what they might do by running a simple command in your Operating System and making one very easy change. This is known as Quality of Service. If you were to run "gpedit.msc" in your Operating System RUN box you would see what is depicted in the image below, and in that editor you could reserve any percentage of bandwidth you wanted in the QoS packet scheduler. If you enable and set that to 50%, you've slowed your connection to the 'Net in a detrimental fashion and degraded your Quality of Service to say the least.
Are you paying for Internet Service? What level of Quality do you expect from your ISP? If they changed the Quality of Service to a detrimental level with ONLY websites who could not or would not pay a premium price many could not afford to begin with, would that affect your experience on the 'Net? THINK ABOUT THIS - the price would be paid in completely flawed Quality of Service for those Internet websites and users who are "just average". Is this what you or anybody you know wants? Doubtful indeed. So here's what YOU can do to help in the Battle for the Net and in preventing the destruction of Net Neutrality.
On the front page of this website through September 10th you will see an opportunity to join in a very large and growing list of people and companies/entities who support stopping the destruction of Net Neutrality. The idea is to make it obvious that this clear and present danger to the 'Net will not be ignored. Should you choose to sign the letter (whether or not you want updates regarding this) it will add to the power that WE THE PEOPLE can wield and put a stop to this draconian madness. Read the letter, sign the letter, it will get to the appropriate people including the US Congress, the FCC, and the White House.