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from the public-servants-not-serving-the-public dept.
Common Dreams reports
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver on [May 7] issued another powerful rallying cry to save net neutrality protections, and, repeating the outcome of his 2014 plea, his viewers flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) site, causing it to temporarily crash.
[...] Oliver said it's worth noting that [FCC Chairman Ajit] Pai is "a former lawyer for Verizon", a company which "won a lawsuit which meant that if the FCC wanted strong, enforceable protection, its only real option was to reclassify the ISPs, and yet he cheerily insists under questioning that there is just not evidence that cable companies were engaging in rampant wrongdoing".
"Title II is the most solid legal foundation we have right now for a strong, enforceable net neutrality protections", Oliver said, and urged "we, the people, [to] take this matter into our own hands".
To that end, Last Week Tonight bought the domain name gofccyourself.com, which redirects users to the official FCC page[1] where open internet advocates can leave a comment and call for these protections to remain in place. (Oliver notes that it simplifies the commenting process the FCC "has made more difficult since three years ago".)
"Everyone needs to get involved. Comment now, and then maybe comment again when the FCC makes its proposal official. Even call you representative and your senators", Oliver urged.
So successful was the start of his campaign, according to Motherboard, that there was such a high volume of traffic flooding the Federal Communications Commission that the site temporarily went down. As of this writing, it is up and running again.
[1] The fcc.gov page is almost entirely behind scripts.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 09 2017, @04:54PM
That is astroturfing 101: The idea is that the ISP lobbyists can now say "Commissioners, we've had 75,000 public comments backing our position." and pretend those represent 75,000 concerned individuals when they in fact represent 1 corporation with access to Tor and/or a botnet and some basic scripting technology. Or alternately, pay 75,000 people $5 apiece to post something like that comment.
The commissioners, of course, could call BS on that, because those comments are suspiciously similar, but won't because they already want to do what the ISP wants to, and the fake public comments give them some political cover to do what they already want to do for other rea$on$.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.