How to protest the scrapping of net neutrality

[Alferd Packer]

Rate-limit the FCC to dialup speeds until they pay you

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to vote for a proposal on May 15th to scrap Net Neutrality. Instead of all sites being given fair and equal access to consumers, this proposal will allow for your ISP to create special internet speed lanes for ultra-rich corporations, and force their own customers wanting to access your site into an internet traffic jam lane that's slower. The bonehead responsible for this idiotic and insane proposal is no less than the chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, a cable industry hand-picked lobbyist.

The FCC isn't doing their job of protecting American consumers, or producers like Neocities users. Perhaps they got a dump truck full of money from the cable corporation lobby, or perhaps they're too busy surfing Neocities sites. Well either way, it looks like they need some help remembering what their job is.

Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the "keep America's internet slow and expensive forever" lobby.

The Ferengi Plan


The Ferengi plan is a special FCC-only plan that costs $1000 per year, and removes the 28.8kbps modem throttle to the FCC. We will happily take Credit Cards, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin from crooked FCC executives that probably have plenty of money from bribes on our Donations page (sorry, we don't accept Latinum yet).

If it bothers you that I'm doing this, I want to point out that everyone is going to be doing crap like this after the FCC rips apart Net Neutrality. It's time for the web to organize and stand up against these thugs before they ruin everything that the web stands for.

While Neocities is a smaller content provider, I heartily applaud their actions. Hell, I'd go a step further and rate-limit every IP address the federal government owns. In any case, while this won't change anything on its own, I do (foolishly) hope a large content provider, like YouTube, takes up the mantle and does the same thing. The IP ranges of the FCC are known, and even on a large website, rate-limiting would be pretty trivial to implement.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

If Netflix, Google, and Facebook all did this, it could be a very big deal. Someone should start a petition.

[PKRudeBoy]

If Netflix and Facebook did that, I doubt they would care, as employees are probably not supposed to be on them at work anyway. Google, on the other hand, would be a blow.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Staff members would get upset and receive a visceral demonstration of the evils of the Waldor-Frey Internet (don't know what the actual term is for the absence of Net Neutrality), so it would be a big deal because it would turn the office culture at the FCC toward Net Neutrality, even if that lesson comes from misuse of work computers. Let's be honest, have you ever been to an office where the employees didn't use work computers for non-work purposes?

[bilateralrope]

The FCC can’t handle all the net neutrality calls it’s getting, urges people to write emails instead

By Brad Reed on May 9, 2014 at 3:20 PM
Email @bwreedbgr

The Federal Communications Commission would rather read your thoughts about net neutrality than hear about them. Columbia Law School professor and leading net neutrality activist Tim Wu points out that calling the FCC’s main consumer hotline will give you a message that asks you to write an email to the commission if you’re calling about FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s controversial net neutrality plans. This seemingly indicates that either the FCC is being flooded with calls about net neutrality that its operators can’t handle them all or it just is tired of hearing everyone call about net neutrality and would like to see them send emails instead. Either way, it looks as though people are speaking up about the issue.

This week has been a very bad one for Wheeler’s proposal that would create Internet “fast lanes” that would let Internet service providers charge companies more to ensure faster traffic delivery. Several big-name tech companies this week — including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix — wrote a joint letter to the FCC telling it to back off any plan that would create a two-tiered Internet and instead urged it to adopt policies that would not only protect against blocking of websites but also the Internet’s traditional architecture where all packets are delivered on a first-come, first-serve basis.

What’s more, two FCC commissioners have come out and said that they want to delay voting on Wheeler’s proposal, which is scheduled to take place at an FCC meeting on May 15th. However, with at least two commissioners seeking to delay the vote and expressing opposition to parts of Wheeler’s plan, it remains unclear whether Wheeler will even have the votes to get his plan passed even if he decides not to table it.

Is it because they get the message, or just because they want ignore everyone talking about it ?

[Gaidin]

Heh.

I don't know. Maybe they can reclass the providers and restart the court fight all over again. Either that or congress passes a law. Either one would be a spectacle.

[Tolya]

Isn't this a lawsuit waiting to happen basing on... dunno, for the lack of anything other in mind... the first amendment? Limiting the freedom of expression and press?

[Gaidin]

On whose part?

The FCC? The courts said net neutrality, at least as they were doing it, was bunk. Now admittedly Wheeler has a history of a lobbyist, and other commissioners seem to be fighting him as they want to dance around the concept and find a legal way to do it. From what I've read of the ruling there seemed to be an opening to still have net neutrality if they did it carefully enough, but that doesn't mean the ISPs wouldn't just drag them right back into court. Grain of salt for Wheeler's history, this literally is the simplest solution with the law available to them. Let them have their fast lanes but come down like a sack of bricks on what they define as unreasonable tolls, possibly on a case by case basis. I mean, they've literally just slapped plenty of people with fines before, no reason they couldn't keep doing it with this concept here, and make the fines bigger for something like this given the possible monumental size. The problem is the more I read the more it seems true net neutrality needs another law expanding Title 47 for FCC, but with this Congress? I have my doubts.

[White Haven]

Without some ability to scale fines on a percentage basis so that they actually cripple large companies, a fine-enforced system will ultimately be toothless. Plus...does anyone actually trust the FCC to do anything other than come down with the wrath and fury of a feather-duster on violators? Really? The FCC?

[Gaidin]

Really? The FCC?

I think they do pretty good as a departmentless agency that thus doesn't have to deal with that particular bit of infighting and politics when they actually have the law they need to back them up. Not like they're the only agency to run into a controversy in history. Me, I wonder what would happen if congress gave them the teeth they actually needed for this situation.