Netflix Is ‘Buffering’ All Day

By Karen Fratti 

battlefornetNo, your Netflix video won’t really be buffering all day, but they’re doing their best to make you think it is.

Visitors to the video streaming site, and others like Vimeo, Reddit, and Twitter are protesting the FCC’s net neutrality proposal with “Internet Slowdown” day. You won’t really have to wait for that episode of “Friday Night Lights” to load, but the spinning widget displayed on Netflix and other participating websites hits an emotional cord.

It’s hard to get people to pay attention to how and why we should defend net neutrality, but that buffering, spinny wheel is infuriating — even when it’s fake. Instead of technical jargon, the widget speaks plain English:

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iinternet slowdown widget

You can take action and sign petitions here, but some are already calling the widget a wimpy move. If you really want the general population to care about protecting the fast lanes, we might have to actually slow the internet down to drive the point home. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, right?

 

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