Jon Brodkin

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on a controversial "fast lane" proposal, and it's inspired a bunch of people to protest by slowing down their own websites.

Recently, a Web hosting company called Neocities throttled its home page, and MaxCDN gave customers the option of doing the same -- but this only slowed websites down for people connecting from an FCC IP address. Now, there's an easy way to throttle your website for everyone who visits.

Venture capitalist Brad Feld just announced the project. There's a Stop The Slow Lane page and a small bit of code on GitHub that inserts the "slow lane" widget on a website.

"The FCC could soon let Internet providers charge websites to access a bogus 'fast lane' and slow down every site that doesn't pay," Feld wrote. "Do you want a slower Internet? Neither do we. Show the world what the FCC's 'slow lane' looks like by embedding the #StopTheSlowLane Widget on your site!"

A Comcast executive said he expects the company will roll out "usage-based billing" -- what most people call "data caps" -- to all of its customers within five years.

Speaking with investors, Comcast Executive VP David Cohen said, "I would predict that in five years Comcast at least would have a usage-based billing model rolled out across its footprint."

Comcast, which has about 20 million broadband customers, has rolled out caps to some of the areas that it serves, including Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, Mississippi; Knoxville and Memphis, Tenessee; and Charleston, South Carolina.

Customers generally get 300GB of data per month, with $10 charges for each extra 50GB. (During the trial period, customers can exceed the cap for three months out of any 12-month period without incurring extra fees.)

Comcast told Ars last November that "98 percent of our customers nationally don’t use 300GB/month." Cohen said that Comcast will raise the limit over time so that the large majority of users won't go over it, suggesting that 500GB is a possible monthly limit by 2019.

For all of Netflix’s complaints about Internet service providers harming video performance, one of the company’s top technology experts is confident that the streaming company can solve most of its customers’ problems. }

The best-known parts of Open Connect are probably the storage boxes that Internet service providers can take into their own networks to bring content closer to consumers. Internet service providers (ISPs) can also peer with Netflix, exchanging traffic directly without hosting Netflix equipment.

But these aren’t the only ways Netflix’s Open Connect technology can deliver good quality. Netflix used to use third-party CDNs such as Akamai, but it has moved most of its traffic over to Open Connect in the past couple of years.

Outside the US, 100 percent of Netflix traffic is distributed using Open Connect equipment. The percentage is in the “high 90s” in the US, with plans to hit 100 percent this summer. Even if the storage boxes aren’t inside an ISP’s network, they’re not too far away. They could even be in the same data centers, the Internet exchange points where Netflix transit providers connect to ISPs.

AT&T urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid reclassifying broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service, which is something network neutrality advocates are asking the FCC to do.

Reclassification would open broadband providers up to common carrier rules under Title II of the Communications Act, similar to regulations that have covered our phone system since 1934. One of the most interesting arguments made by AT&T is that Title II reclassification would force giant changes in the peering and interconnection markets. Reclassification could also bring lots of new requirements for ISPs that don’t directly serve consumers, AT&T argued.

Lots of people are angry about Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's Internet "fast lane" proposal that would let Internet service providers charge Web services for priority access to consumers.

But one Web hosting service called NeoCities isn't just writing letters to the FCC. Instead, the company found the FCC's internal IP address range and throttled all connections to 28.8Kbps speeds.

"Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's Internet slow and expensive forever' lobby," NeoCities creator Kyle Drake wrote.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission's proposal to let Internet service providers charge Web services for a "fast lane" probably isn't a good thing for the Internet -- even the FCC said so itself in 2010 when it warned that such payments would give ISPs "incentives to allow congestion rather than invest in expanding network capacity."

But it's important not to exaggerate the potential effects of the proposed rule.

We have seen headlines such as "The FCC’s new net neutrality proposal is already ruining the Internet" and "Net neutrality ruling scaring VCs away from investing in certain startups."

Right now, there are no network neutrality rules in place in the US. The rules the FCC issued in 2010 were overturned by a federal appeals court, and now the FCC is writing new ones that will probably be weaker than the original plan.

It may well be true that startups will have a tougher time competing against the Netflixes, YouTubes, and Hulus of the world if and when those companies purchase a faster path from ISP data centers to consumers' homes. But it's hard to believe that venture capitalists will suddenly ignore Internet startups in any great numbers.

There's still a huge opportunity for startups to upend the cable TV business model that consumers hate, venture capitalist Joel Yarmon of Draper Associates told Ars. Draper has invested in Twitch.tv, SocialCam, and other online startups.

"You'd better believe I'm looking for companies that are going to disrupt that [TV market] and you better believe that whether I fund them or not, people are going to start companies that disrupt [it] because that is an opportunity," he said.

Yahoo announced that it will stop complying with Do Not Track signals that Web browsers send on behalf of users who wish to not be monitored for advertising purposes.

When users click the Do Not Track setting in their browser, an HTTP header is sent to websites to state the user’s preference not to be tracked.

"While some third parties have committed to honor Do Not Track, many more have not,” the project website states. “In February 2012, the major online advertising trade groups pledged at the White House to support Do Not Track by the end of 2014; that promise remains unfulfilled. Efforts to standardize Do Not Track in the World Wide Web Consortium have resulted in deadlock, despite frequent urging by American and European policymakers.”

Yahoo also refused to honor Do Not Track signals from Internet Explorer 10 in late 2012 because Microsoft decided to turn it on by default instead of asking users to make the choice.

Netflix is looking for an engineer to research using a peer-to-peer architecture for streaming.

When asked whether the company intends to stream video using P2P, a Netflix spokesperson replied only that "the best way to see it is that we look at all kinds of routes."

Google Fiber began as a service just for residents and public buildings like schools, libraries, and community centers, but it's now being expanded to cover businesses as well.

Google will start a pilot program to connect small businesses in Kansas City before rolling out a more widely available service.

"We are working hard to finalize our service offering for small businesses and would like to invite you to be part of the process," Google says. "We are looking for a few businesses in Kansas City to provide feedback about using Fiber at work.

"Over the next few months, we’ll be connecting a limited number of small businesses to our network in exchange for feedback about the service." Since Google is still figuring out logistics, there's no word yet on when it will be launched to bigger portions of its service area.

A Google Fiber job posting in New York City has a bunch of tech news sites excited about the prospect of Google bringing its fiber Internet service to the Big Apple.

But Google says there are no such plans.

"We're entirely focused on building out our networks in Kansas City, Austin, and Provo, and on exploring the possibility of bringing Fiber to the 34 locations we announced in February," a Google spokesperson told Ars. Google recently announced that it chose nine metro areas around the country for potential Fiber deployments.

The closest ones to New York City are Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia.

New York City already has fiber in the form of Verizon FiOS, and Google has focused mostly on underserved areas where municipal officials are willing to provide expedited permitting and other perks. There are still millions of Americans without broadband, so there are plenty of areas where Google Fiber is needed.