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?

FWIW, I think that donating money is pretty real.

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.

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.

"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.

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

Good plan, let me know how that works out.

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."

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.

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!

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?

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?

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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."