The Case for a Slower Internet
This post was adapted from a project for my AP Lang class during my junior year of high school.
The Internet is the way of the future. We use it for everything: chatting with friends, completing assignments at school, and watching our favorite TV shows at the end of the day. But we don’t typically don’t think of how the Internet has negatively affected our lives because of how ingrained it is in society. How do we fix these issues? Slow down the internet.
Making high-speed internet less accessible to the average American would positively affect society, as it would limit Internet addiction and intrusive tracking technologies while maintaining all the positive aspects of information sharing that have made the Internet so great.
One of the greatest tolls on society caused by high-speed Internet is addiction. The addiction that the Internet has caused is largely based on the easy transfer of photos and videos across the web. Without it, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat would all not be possible. A slower Internet would mostly only allow for text-based messaging and social media platforms, which would be much less addicting to the average user.
For example with Snapchat, it would not be possible to Snap, or send images, to others that you might not even be close friends with all day long. These images would simply take too much bandwidth to send in a reasonable amount of time on a slower Internet. Messaging would be much more purposeful and meaningful. It would take a conscious effort to communicate with those close to us, not just a few swipes of a finger.
This is not to say that platforms such as Twitter, which are mostly text-based, don’t have their own problems. Addiction is still possible with these platforms, and the algorithms under the hood of these platforms is a whole other issue to tackle. However, it is clear that without images or videos on these platforms, addiction would be much less widespread.
This type of Internet addiction is not exclusive to social media, either. A vast swath of the American population is addicted to explicit imagery and video, made only possible by high-speed Internet. This type of addition would once again not be possible without widespread access to this explicit content within a few clicks. Just asking someone who has quit, and it is obvious that it makes a massive increase in their lives after a few months or even just weeks. Now imagine this on a societal scale, and America will be stronger than ever.
Furthermore, a slower Internet would limit the ability of corporations to collect sensitive data on individuals. We are tracked in countless ways on the modern Internet. Technologies such as tracking cookies, tracking beacons, and fingerprinting have allowed companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon to collect data about everywhere we go on the Internet. In fact, according to whotracks.me, Google trackers are present on 78% of all web traffic.
Have you ever seen an advertisement on a website that seems a little too personal? Maybe it was about a product that you just talked to your friend about or mentioned on social media. This isn’t a coincidence.
On average, 12 megabytes of data are required to be loaded on websites by trackers (also according to whotracks.me). This is not an insignificant amount and can add up when considering the vast amount of websites and services we all visit every day. The kind of tracking on the Internet we see today would simply not be possible with slower speeds.
Would companies still find ways to track us using less bandwidth? Yes, and it would be ignorant not to acknowledge that. But there is no doubt that their tracking techniques would be significantly limited without high-speed Internet.
This isn’t limited to websites, either. Services such as Hey Google and Amazon Alexa would no longer be able to depend on the processing of voice data in the cloud, instead of having to rely on the resources of the device itself. Without being able to transmit full audio clips across the Internet effortlessly, our privacy would be greatly improved.
It is important to clarify that a slower Internet would not make the things we know and love about the Internet impossible. Rather, it would mean that we would have to change the way we operate to fit the more restrictive requirements.
Cable TV could be used instead of streaming services. More text-based messaging could be used instead of more multimedia-focused messaging. All the services we use on a daily basis would be rewritten to reduce the bloat and excessiveness of our modern Internet. Even phone calls and in-person meetings could be used instead of video calls that we have become accustomed to over the pandemic. In an era with increasing anxiety, would more face-to-face interaction really be that bad of a thing?
And in this scenario, we are not to assume that technological innovation slows down as well. Your laptop and phone can still be faster than ever, but the medium at which these devices communicate with each other is the only aspect that slows down.
However, at the end of the day, this all hinges on the assumption that we have a magical dial that controls the speed of the Internet. In reality, this pipe dream would not even be close to possible. Even if this dial did exist and someone was crazy enough to propose a bill limiting the speed of our Internet, it wouldn’t be passed. Not today, not tomorrow, never. Lobbyists for Big Tech would certainly make this nearly impossible for legislators to pass, and it is a hard sell to Americans whose every aspect of their daily lives has been touched by the Internet. How would a voter respond to their legislator keeping them from FaceTiming their grandparents, or streaming TV shows to relax at the end of a stressful workday? That kind of risk is not one that any sensible politician would take up. Even though there are alternatives to the services of the Internet that Americans use every day, people wouldn’t be happy about making the switch to a service that is possibly less convenient, slower, and less immersive.
And even if this bill was able to pass Congress, who’s to say anything would really change? Big Tech companies simply have too much to lose from a slower Internet that relies on their services less. We can’t assume that these companies wouldn’t rewrite their services and trackers to function with lower bandwidth. While videos might be out of the picture, images could be more compressed and lower resolution. When billions of dollars are on the line, solutions will arise one way or another.
The Internet as we know it today has problems - we all know that. But the right solution to these problems is not to place a ball and chain around the ankle of the most revolutionary technology in human history. Hearing an argument about limiting the global network of computers is awfully ironic coming from a student studying for his Cisco Certified Network Associate certification. And that’s because all of this isn’t about slowing down the Internet. Rather, it’s about how each and every single one of us needs to take a solid look at our lives and reexamine the way the Internet has affected us, myself included.
With Facebook announcing its Metaverse, a platform where users strap tiny screens onto their eyes and submerge themselves in an imaginary digital world, there is no doubt that the Internet will only continue to have a stronghold over our lives. However, we still have control over our own destinies. We can choose to move away from services that continuously track our movements on the web. We can choose to limit our use of social media, hence freeing ourselves from the grasp of ever-evolving algorithms used to trap us in our screens. We can choose to favor interaction with other humans in real life, instead of through our devices.
The Internet has controlled our lives for too long — it’s time that we finally control it.