Comedian John Oliver, formerly of Comedy Central's Daily Show and now host of his own news satire show, Last Week Tonight on HBO, used a 13-minute rant on the FCC's pending review of Net neutrality rules to encourage Internet commenters to "once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction."
He encouraged Internet trolls ("Monsters") and the less psychotic to take advantage of the FCC's call for public comment on net neutrality.
Oliver's delivery on his show achieved more than a modicum of success as the subsequent outpouring of response overwhelmed and crashed FCC servers.
"Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet," a comment section on the FCC website, was inundated with approximately 46,000 comments. The FCC then tweeted that "We've been experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system due to heavy traffic." About two hours later, order had not yet been restored. An FCC spokesperson later said that it was unclear if the high volume was directly related to the John Oliver segment.
The FCC is operating an open comment period from May 15 through June 27.
At issue is an expected ruling from the FCC against the concept of net neutrality. Net neutrality means that Internet service providers can't offer super-duper fast broadband connection speeds for tech corporations at higher cost, a move which is feared will price out smaller tech companies and businesses.
Internet service providers including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and others are against net neutrality, as are network equipment providers such as Qualcomm, Cisco and Alcatel. It is easy to see that these companies are motivated by profit and business growth considerations. Their argument, however, is that many corporations are chewing up far more than their fair share of bandwidth by, for example, streaming movie and video content as their business model.
Companies opposed to net neutrality claim that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; and that consumers are negatively affected by the logjam and reduced network speeds that result from the heavy draw on resources by many client companies. Internet service providers also claim that these practices create an undue and costly strain on their equipment and pipelines.
On the other side of the net are those that fear extra cost, unfair competition and an antigrowth business environment. Included are Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Consumers Union and others.
There is also a middle ground, those that want to take one from Column A and one from Column B; these participants would be willing to allow broadband providers to charge more for exclusive, high-speed and bandwidth-heavy services (such as television over IP) while guaranteeing that basic consumer and public interest broadband service remains satisfyingly swift, free or reasonably priced.
