Brooklyn companies participating in tomorrow’s Internet Slowdown Day

On Wednesday, Sept. 10, websites around the country will place a symbolic loading symbol on their sites to raise awareness about a proposed rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that would make it feasible to create two tiers of the Internet: a faster lane where big companies pay for better speeds and a slower lane where everyone else competes.

In a bit of Orwellian language, the FCC has described the proposed rulemaking as “Protecting and Promoting an Open Internet.” Read the agency’s documents here. For a quicker summary of the rule and its broader context in the Net Neutrality fight, read this coverage in The Washington Post from May, right after the text was released.

Websites that support Net Neutrality will show a widget on their sites as a way of raising awareness, the code for which you can get at Battle for the Net.

We know of at least three Brooklyn companies that will be participating this Wednesday:

• Etsy: See CEO Chad Dickerson’s op-ed on the topic in Wired.
• Kickstarter: Yancey Strickler released a copy of his official comment and wrote about it in The Washington Post.
• VHX: CEO Jamie Wilkinson wrote about the threat a fast lane poses to a video-based business on the company blog, which Democracy Now anchor Amy Goodman quoted in this piece for TruthDig.

Public comment on the rule closes Sept. 15. The more people who weigh in the better. The issue has received a lot of comments, though the fewer than 10,000 number is rather small when you consider the implications of the issue. The rulemaking on Comcast’s proposal to purchase Time Warner Cable, for example, has received six times more comments.

Tell the FCC what you think

Or use the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s customizable form letter. The organization also did a quick explainer of the process.