Two years after the Federal Communications Commission passed the net neutrality rules that prevent content providers from paying ISPs for a faster pipeline to customers, the debate about the regulation heated up again in the last month, as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to reverse the regulation introduced by Obama’s administration. And just as it happened before, the FCC’s site faced a massive flood of comments discussing net neutrality after comedian John Oliver called the public for action.
According to Reuters, more than 100,000 comments have been registered since Sunday and temporarily crashed the FCC’s site. Meanwhile, the FCC reported that their site was hit by deliberate “distributed denial-of-service attacks” soon after Oliver invited viewers to oppose Pai’s plan by filing electronic comments with the regulator’s web site during his HBO show "Last Week Tonight" on Sunday. Here's what the FFC statement posted on May 8 says:
Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.
All this brings us back in 2014 when John Oliver mobilized the support for the net neutrality rules using a similar approach and providing the FCC with more than 4 million comments about the matter. Obviously, the discussion is far from over and it becomes a hot topic again, as Pei's plan for revision of the net neutrality regulation is soon to be initially voted – on May 18, during the FCC's monthly meeting.
The advocates of the regulation adopted in 2015 argue that a net neutrality policy is necessary for maintaining the internet as an open platform, equally accessible to all ISPs and websites, while the largest US broadband companies oppose the regulation because it treats them as "common” carriers under the Title II of the Communications Act and subjects the industry to stronger government control. The first see the net neutrality policy as an instrument for economic growth, online innovation and free speech, while the latter reckon it could actually restrain the innovations and lead to decrease in broadband capital investment.
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