So it turns out that the call to arms from John Oliver to
save net neutrality prevent cable company fuckery might not have
broken FCC.gov after all. VICE is reporting that it was a hacked
database denial of service attack, which would be pretty obnoxious, and doesn't do much to make the case for the productive use of the internet all of us are trying to protect. Badly done, hackers. Badly done. If you did it.
Because the FCC itself is saying it wasn't attacked, and yes the huge number of comments coming in could have broken it. Because it is 17 years old.
For now, it's reasonable to believe that it was, as the FCC says, just an issue of a large increase in visitors triggering errors across its 17-year-old site. "This could have been caused by a number of things. Because our system is so old," the spokesperson says, "it's not set up to receive the load of comments we received last week."
At least they have a newer commenting system than the
VA's scheduling system. The Republican plan to destroy all of government is going along swimmingly.
That aside, the FCC has logged nearly 103,000 comments on "Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet" as it calls the issue in the last thirty days. The next most commented on issue for the agency is the closely related Comcast/Time Warner mergers at just about 3,700 comments. Those are largely comments from real, albeit sometimes odd people. There might also be some in there opposed to net neutrality from people who had no idea they were taking a position on the issue, thanks to the cable companies astroturfing.
We've got another month to make our voices drown out the astroturfers. If you haven't already, send your comments. You can use the FCC comments page; the inbox they set up specifically for this issue, openinternet@fcc.gov; and with Daily Kos's petition.