Trump’s FCC wants to kill net neutrality, and we knew that ever since the new chairman, Ajit Pai, took office. But with an initial vote scheduled for May 18, John Oliver rallied the troops once again, urging every person who’s interested in strong net neutrality rules to voice their concerns on the FCC’s website, no matter how hard it is to find the comments section for this particular policy. Well, Last Week Tonight bought a site that links directly to the FCC web page you need.
But the Commission said on Monday that its website was also hit with deliberate denial of service attacks (DDoS) after Oliver slammed the FCC for looking to overturn the Obama-era internet regulation rules.
The FCC’s proposal received more than 100,000 comments since Sunday when Oliver’s show aired on HBO. But hackers also targeted the site, which made it difficult for some users to post their comments, Reuters reports.
The FCC said“was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks. 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.”
Back in 2014, the same Oliver took a similar pro-net neutrality stance on his HBO show. The FCC received more than 4 million comments at the time, most of them favoring Obama’s rules.
Under the current rules, set in 2015, internet service providers can’t offer or sell preferential treatment to any internet company. The FCC now wants to overturn these rules that essentially ensure equal internet access for all services out there.
It’s likely the FCC will receive plenty of comments opposing its current plans, as long as the site isn’t under DDoS attacks.
Reuters also points out the irony of Oliver’s strong support for net neutrality, which makes his message even more impressive. AT&T, which opposed the Obama FCC rules, agreed to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion in October. Time Warner owns HBO, which airs Oliver’s Last Week Tonight..
