After a barrage of criticism from comedian John Oliver on his late-night talk and new satire television show, "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver," the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that its servers received a number of online attacks from unknown parties. The Washington Post along with a number of other mainstream media outlets covered the story. The FCC was criticized for its recent announcements that it would roll back the changes in the Net Neutrality rules that were put in place under President Barack Obama's administration.
A call to action
During his late-night talk show, Oliver urged internet users everywhere to join him in informing the FCC that they do not want any of the rollbacks to the current net neutrality rules. The talk show host even made it easier for users to comment by directing them to a website they created, called "gofccyourself.com." Going directly to the FCC website required a lot of steps and specific inputs before reaching the comments page. All the steps can, fortunately, be bypassed by going to Oliver's website.
Oliver was an outspoken proponent of the original net neutrality rules and actually helped galvanize it back in 2014 when his comments regarding its implementation went viral. During that time, the FCC received more than 4 million comments, which led to the FCC to reclassify internet service providers (ISPs) as similar to utilities.
A fair and open internet
Under the new classification, the net neutrality rules prohibited ISPs from discriminating the type of data they are sending out and receiving from its consumers. Under the rules, ISPs will not be able to sell or give faster speeds to interested parties or to their own services. Without these rules, ISPs could arbitrarily increase or decrease the internet speeds of certain services allowing paying services to have an unfair advantage.
As an example, ISPs could favor certain types of streaming services and slow down its competitors so that users will have no other choice but to subscribe to the faster option.
The public has spoken
Shortly after the particular episode went viral, the FCC website received thousands of comments. Since the show aired, over 100,000 comments have been received by the agency, which is a clear indication that a lot of internet users are against the proposed reversals.
The FCC even announced Monday that its website had received numerous deliberate denial of service (DDoS) attacks from unknown parties. The attacks basically shut down the agency's servers, which rendered it inaccessible to other users.
