The SOPA fight was so successful because the rallying call was super clear: Don't Censor The Internet! Was SOPA strictly censorship? Well, not precisely - but

The SOPA fight was so successful because the rallying call was super clear: Don't Censor The Internet! Was SOPA strictly censorship? Well, not precisely - but that would have been basically the result. You could go on for an hour about all the details of the bill's mechanisms and how it breaks this thing called DNS which is a really important system that assigns names to numbers and that's bad because DNSSEC is important and we really need to get internet security right... and by the end nobody is listening anymore. Calling it censorship was close enough, and it triggered an immediate and negative reaction strong enough to get people to listen and act. Likewise with the FCC proposal. You could go on for an hour talking about how IP routing works through internet backbone providers and how when an ISP doesn't upgrade their interconnects you get congestion which causes dropped packets which increases TCP latency and that's bad for new websites that depend on backbone providers because that's how the internet is structured and it's super important and.... now nobody is listening. "Slow Lane" achieves something similar to "censorship" - an immediate and negative reaction, hopefully strong enough to get people to act. Plus a visual demonstration for users already frustrated with the broadband they pay too much for really drives it home. Is the FCC explicitly creating a "slow lane"? Well, not precisely. But it's the result. So let's call it that.