FCC website attacked following John Oliver’s plea to save net neutrality

The FCC says its website saw multiple DDoS attacks following John Oliver’s call for viewers to fight for net neutrality laws.

Just two weeks ago, Ajit Pai unveiled a more specific plan to get rid of the Obama-era FCC’s signature achievements – namely net neutrality laws. I explained that while it was likely that the plan would be approved on May 18 given FCC’s Republican majority, the reclassification of common carriers and the nullification of net neutrality could have detrimental ramifications for consumers.

Well, I am certainly not alone, it looks like. John Oliver, as you may have expected, is one of the many advocates for net neutrality, among big companies like Google, Amazon, and Netflix. On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver brought up net neutrality issues again, asking viewers to fight against telecommunications companies trying to prioritize certain information and sell fast lanes to Internet content providers.

He purchased the domain gofccyourself.com and asked users to leave comments on the FCC’s website, but apparently, some users took it a little too far: according to the FCC, its website 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.”

Of course, it’s unclear whether John Oliver’s remarks have directly led to these DDoS attacks, but since then, the proposal has received more than 100,000 comments. The initial vote for Pai’s plan may pass without difficulty in two weeks, but there are still more hurdles to jump through: political opposition aside, there may be legal issues that could prevent the FCC from gutting net neutrality laws after defending them so adamantly since 2014.

What are your thoughts on net neutrality laws? Let us know in the comments below!