A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

The advantage of having a proxy or a firewall on which you can place blocking and whitelists, is that you can replace the total bandwith of a site by 1kb for each connection that is refused.

This way if you want to block facebook, ebay or youtube to name but the most important eaters of bandwith, you will see an immediate effect.

Some of it is just their own big fault. They have made embeds and applications that have spread like a virus on other sites and services. These are all calling the motherships. But they haven't made lightweight embeds and applications, no the more pixels, links and bells and bangs the better.

The Google frontpage lesson seems to be forgotten in the web2.0 world. That lesson is that each pixel that you use is x milliseconds of time that your customers have to wait and x thousands of Euro's that you have to invest yourself to keep it as fast as possible.

So if you want your users to have a fast and pleasant internet experience without investing in bigger internetconnections, you just block those sites for the whole day (or not during lunchbreaks).

facebook.com, fbcdn.com, ebay.com, ebaystatic.com, youtube.com

For security reasons you should have already blocked icq.com and IRC channels. That is an absolute must.