The FCC put out its plan on Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon I had three emails from small clients asking, in various polite ways, whether this was going to hurt them, and I spent Thanksgiving morning writing back instead of dealing with the pie.
The short version: chairman Ajit Pai wants to unwind the 2015 open internet rules, and the commission votes on December 14. The long version is that most brand people have filed net neutrality under policy, meaning somebody else's problem, meaning a thing to have an opinion about on Twitter and then forget.
It is not somebody else's problem. It is a distribution question wearing a policy costume.
Every small brand that has ever won online has won because a customer could not tell, from the loading of the page, how big the company behind it was.
That is the whole trick. A four person roaster in Southeast Portland and a national chain arrive on a phone at the same speed. The site is the storefront, the storefront is the same size for everybody, and so the thing that decides is the product and the story rather than the infrastructure budget. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms for a decade, and it is the single condition that made challenger brands possible. Warby Parker did not out-spend anybody. It out-arrived them.
Take the equal speed away and you get a tier. Paid prioritization means a company can buy a faster lane, and a faster lane is not a small advantage. A two second delay on a product page is a measurable chunk of your conversion, and the people who leave never know why they left. They just felt that something was slightly worse and went somewhere else.
A two second delay on a product page is a measurable chunk of your conversion, and the people who leave never know why they left.
Nobody will announce this. There will be no press release saying your Portland client now loads in the slow tier. It will show up as a quiet decline in a metric everyone blames on creative.
What to do about it, honestly, is limited and unglamorous. Comment before the vote. Make your site genuinely light, because the brands that will survive a tiered internet are the ones that were never bloated to begin with. Own your email list, since nobody can throttle an inbox. And stop treating your website as a brochure and start treating it as the shelf, because it is.
Then Saturday I went to karaoke, and the host who calls everyone baby put me up for Fleetwood Mac, and for four minutes nothing was load-bearing except my inability to hit the bridge.