John Oliver Versus FCC: Round 2

Three years ago, on the fifth episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver called out the FCC over the controversial net neutrality debate. John Oliver’s in-depth segment on the subject ended with Oliver leaving links to the FCC website and asking people to express their concerns over the matter.

To the dismay of the FCC, the episode attracted much attention which in turned caused many to flock to the website and leave comments. The rapid amount of comments causes the FCC website to crash and even issue a statement via Twitter to inform the masses that the website was temporality down.

On last Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver decided to revisit the favorite topic and recalled the internet to voice their concerns over the renewed debate on net neutrality on the FCC’s website.

For those who do not understand what is going on, here is the brief outlook on the subject. Net neutrality is the code that all internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet should treat all the data on the web the same. For example, if one likes to use Google, Internet service providers cannot slow down Google for other completion for any reason.

So why does John Oliver bring back this topic? Well the Trump administration has announced plans to roll back Obama era net neutrality rules on equal access. All being led by the new Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai.

As pointed out by John Oliver, Pai shows himself as a seemly simple guy. His Twitter feed is filled with “The Big Lebowski” quotes and photos of himself showing off his “infamous” oversize Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup mug, but Pai is a former lawyer for Verizon who has sworn to “take a weed whacker” to regulations of net neutrality.

John Oliver then asks the internet to join forces once again to express their feelings towards the new tactics against net neutrality but has stated that the process is a bit different this time. To avoid any more future traffic crashes, the FCC made changes to their website to make it harder to submit comments through a filter system. Oliver then linked everyone to a website link that skips all the menus and puts users in the comment section called www.gofccyourself.com.

As of May 8th, the website was hit with many denial-of-service attacks or DDOS which caused some issue with the site and prevented FCC servers from responding to people’s comments.

According to a commission from the FCC, “These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with the high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.”

Entering www.gofccyourself.com into one’s browser will still take one to the final step on the FCC website and is still encouraged to voice against the change of the internet.