8 ms·

We are throttling the FCC to dialup modem speeds until they pay us for bandwidth

282 points by kyledrake 12y ago

nobody_nowhere 12y ago
Cute.
mful 12y ago
This is a clever stunt, though I'm not sure how effective this strategy would be even on a more popular site. It seems unlikely that this form of protest would reach a large enough audience, given the relatively small number people who are directly affected, to gain any traction. EDIT: Grammar
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  Maybe they're hoping to inspire others to join them in this action, possibly leading to a key player treating the FCC like this. What's Google's stance on net neutrality nowadays?
  - mful 12y ago
    That's exactly my point. I don't think just throttling the FCC employees is the best approach to taking a stance on net neutrality, regardless of the size of the 'key player'. I would argue that throttling consumers (with explanation) would be more effective.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    That worked for SOPA because a few congressmen were in highly contested districts already, and even losing 0.5% of their voters next election could ruin their chances of reelection. The FCC chairman is not elected. Nor is he appointed by Congress. They can all genuinely claim that they had little or no control over his decisions. So it does not matter if everyone pulls a stunt this time. Besides, if the man isn't lying and he somehow subverts state laws that prohibit municipal networks, then that more than makes up for any other wrong he has committed. I can sure as hell influence my city council more easily than I can influence the federal government.
    - wfjackson 12y ago
      "Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, with positions including President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA"
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
        What's your point? Instead of trying to make a logical argument, your comment seems designed to inspire some vague outrage.
    - tedchs 12y ago
      Just FYI, Congress does not appoint anyone. They confirm the President's appointments.
    - loumf 12y ago
      Generally the electorate is happy to punish their rep for anything the government is supposed to do. If Wikipedia.com, google.com, etc says your rep. isn't helping protect net-neutrality and to call them, then people will call. Enough calls, and congress drags in the FCC, starts passing laws, etc.
- AimHere 12y ago
  Well maybe there's room for mass action along these lines. If, some ISP, say, "Bombcast", decides to throttle some website, say "Slacker News" as part of an extortion plan, can't we have every other content-providing internet service - be it Wikipedia, reddit, AirBnB, Facebook, maybe even google, if they're on this side of the fight - throttle all of Bombcast's customers right back. Suddenly half of Bombcast's customers find their favourite sites moving at unacceptable speeds, with a black border around the edges and an annoying black popup window telling them exactly why their website access is being throttled, and recommending they switch to some less heinous ISP instead. Naturally, hit the FCC, any part of the US legislature that voted against Net Neutrality and so forth into the bargain. Force customers to choose between the faceless drones who laid the cable to their door ten years ago and send them a bill every month, or the guys who provide all the shiny internet stuffs that they enjoy for more or less free. Might some sort of content provider's union be quite powerful? Because of who they are, they have a head start at winning hearts and minds so they'd have leeway when it comes to taking action that might alienate their public.
  - mful 12y ago
    I agree that this would make a lot of sense. Unless I misunderstood the OP, Neocities seems to be advocating for specifically throttling the FCC, not consumers in general. What you are describing seems to be more along the lines of Brad Feld's post[1] from the other day. [1] http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-demo-slow-lane.html http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-d...
  - icehawk219 12y ago
    The problem with this plan is that Bombcast couldn't care less. They have a monopoly so what are their customers going to do? Switch to a non-existent ISP? And thanks to the death of Net Neutrality Bombcast can even go as far as to say "Hey Netflix, see this competitor of ours? Your rate just went up 250% if their customers are allowed on your site." (and for those thinking this would run afoul of anti-trust regulations you are 100% correct and I would LOVE to live in a universe where the government cared enough to do something about it, but I just can't believe that that would actually happen). ISPs have proven time and time again that they can't be bothered to care about their customers. So while I would like to see your idea come to fruition the only people who really lose are the customers. The ISP doesn't care, the FCC doesn't care, the rest of the government doesn't care, even the people don't care enough to do anything substantial.
wil421 12y ago
This sounds like a great plan but I think the FCC probably cares as much about access to neocities as they actually care about the consumers. If we could find a 3rd party the FCC depends on for their IT infrastructure and then limit that pipe, it might have some effect.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  Maybe it would be better to make it the whole federal government rather than just the FCC? That would at least get more people complaining (especially if more than just this site would do it).
  - wil421 12y ago
    I love it. If the govt can shut itself down like last year then the people should be able deny them services.
valarauca1 12y ago
I would really like to see larger corporations like google, facebook, reddit, 4chan, etc. do this to anyone connection from a government end point for a day or two. Just make them see how bad removing net neutrality would be.
- adrr 12y ago
  I don't get why these companies just don't charge the cable companies for the right to carry their content. TV stations charge cable companies, cable company has a choice to not carry it but risk losing customers because they lack content. Content is king in this war .
  - crashandburn4 12y ago
    The problem is that america is almost a monopoly, no other country really has these problems[0] [0] http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet-middleman/ http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-inte...
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Cheers for posting that, was pretty enlightening.
      - crashandburn4 12y ago
        No problem, I found it on hacker news and as always here the comments[0] are almost as enlightening as the piece itself. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699862
        lotsofmangos 12y ago
        I'm in the UK and I thought the situation here was pretty terrible on the basis that if you go out into the sticks things get pretty slow. There's a joke, that BT develops core telecoms technologies and sells them across the world. Then when they are finally obsolete, it installs them in Britain. However it sounds like the US has cities running on worse than you get over here in farming villages.
viggity 12y ago
The internet has flourished because of a lack of regulation, not despite a lack of regulation. Let the companies duke it out and keep the government out of it. If I were in netflix's shoes I'd just charge each comcast customer enough extra to cover the surcharge and mark it clearly on their bill. Let comcast deal with the deluge of complaints to their call centers.
- crashandburn4 12y ago
  I actually really like the netflix idea but I still think net neutrality is too important to not be regulated, I wish netflix or someone similar would say "this is what we are going to do, here is comcasts customer support number, here is the FCC complaints department/whatever and here is a petition" in advance of the bill and actually mobilize some more people to do things and complain.
  - ArtDev 12y ago
    Where is the army of lobbyists fighting for the internet? Didn't we learn anything from SOPA?
    - jchung 12y ago
      I think the answer you're looking for is: "Money".
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > If I were in netflix's shoes I'd just charge each comcast customer enough extra to cover the surcharge and mark it clearly on their bill. Let comcast deal with the deluge of complaints to their call centers. Nothing is more clear than the fact that Comcast cares nothing about customer service. American ISPs regularly appear at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys. They just don't care. Putting the charge on the customer's Netflix bill might be effective if it led the customer to conclude that switching ISPs in order to remove the charge would be cost effective. But when the customer has no viable alternative ISP, all it does is make Netflix more expensive. Since presumably Netflix is already charging the profit-maximizing price for its service, adding an additional charge would do nothing for Netflix but exceed the profit-maximizing price and cause it to lose money.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
__david__ 12y ago
I'd throttle the FCC. What is their internal IP block?
- crazypyro 12y ago
  Seriously, why doesn't the author release their internal IP block? This could create a valid way of protest against it. Hell, big name tech companies could get in on this.
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    If some script kiddy on Reddit or Anonymous abuse that information "for the lulz" or "sake of the internetz" with DoS etc., the author would needlessly get into trouble since he got it confidentially.
    - crazypyro 12y ago
      I'm sure the author could have easily been creative enough to hide that he was his own source. Also are IPs really considered private information? I thought the whole point of IPs was they can be shared. A simple (probably flawed) example: "Oh hey, I found this pastebin with the FCC's IP block, don't know where it came from"
    - ohashi 12y ago
      It's not really secret, you can look it up on ARIN. EG: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-165-135-0-0-1/pft http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-165-135-0-0-1/pft
    - mnw21cam 12y ago
      It would be hilarious if someone was to try and DoS the FCC network, but were to be foiled by someone in-between them rate-limiting it to 28.8k.
- benjarrell 12y ago
  FCC (NET-165-135-0-0-1) 165.135.0.0 - 165.135.255.255 FCCNET2 (NET-192-133-125-0-1) 192.133.125.0 - 192.133.125.255 FCCNET (NET-192-104-54-0-1) 192.104.54.0 - 192.104.54.255 FCC2-126-30 (NET-4-21-126-0-1) 4.21.126.0 - 4.21.126.255 FCC (NET6-2620-610-1) 2620:0:610:: - 2620:0:610:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF SPRINTLINK (NET-208-23-64-0-1) 208.23.64.0 - 208.23.64.127 TBD (NET6-2600-803-230-1) 2600:803:230:: - 2600:803:230:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF Q0503-65-125-25-64 (NET-65-125-25-64-1) 65.125.25.64 - 65.125.25.127
wfjackson 12y ago
Isn't Neocities mostly text? In that case 28.8kbps is not going to be too much lag time. If that's the case they should add some latency instead, like 5 to 10 sec. That gets annoying quickly.
brokentone 12y ago
Can we open source this as a server module of some variety?
- cordite 12y ago
  What, and have a centralized registry of IP's to slow down?
clockworkelf 12y ago
Haha, Obama's "bad" pick. So Michael Taylor from Monsanto is a "good" pick for the FDA?
rynes 12y ago
$1,000 is way too low - any lobbyist has more than that in his pants for "walking around money." They spend more than that taking a Govt. Official to lunch.
- walden42 12y ago
  No, they shouldn't be able to pay to get full service back. Paying any sum of money does not come from their pockets, but from taxpayer pockets. They'd pay any price and not care one bit.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Nice idea, would probably work if a big player like google or facebook did it.
therogerwilco 12y ago
/clap
ohashi 12y ago
So how would you implement this on other sites? People started a campaign with JS snippet last time for SOPA. Would this be an apache/nginx line? I'm actually not sure how I would go about throttling IPs from my server.
bcRIPster 12y ago
The more I think about it, the only way you're going to get movement on this is to get people pissed off, and for that to happen, someone like Google would need to apply this throttle to EVERYONE along with a link to a page where they could mock pay to have their speed restored. Now that would get some attention.
junto 12y ago
Cloudflare need a one click opt-in button in their client admin, to turn on such a feature for anyone to do with promoting anti-net-neutrality. I'd enable that setting and I imagine lots of others would. I imagine Cloudflare already have a lot of sites under their control.
- arh68 12y ago
  Who's going to maintain the uh, brownlist?
  - junto 12y ago
    Crowd-sourced? Shall we start one somewhere? Let's start with Comcast's headquarters... :-)
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > I'd enable that setting and I imagine lots of others would I absolutely would - I run a few sites under Cloudflare. Instead of slowing down the traffic coming from the FCC (which is likely to be small), I'd recommend throttling by geography. For example, Comcast is based in Philadelphia (they already own the tallest building in Philadelphia[0], and are building another even larger one[0]). I imagine (e.g.) the denizens of Philadelphia would become a lot more vocal in their support for net neutrality with their elected officials if they started getting throttled. You could say that it's unfair to pick on Philadelphians when they haven't done anything wrong themselves. I'd agree, but on the other hand, that's what makes this so effective - it shows people how unjust and unfair the concept of content-based throttling is. It reminds me of Dan Savage's response to a poor woman who happened to share a last name with Rick Santorum, and wrote to him asking him to stop dragging her name through the mud[2], as she was only distantly related to him. His response was something along the lines of, "Instead of writing to me asking me to stop, write to him and ask him to stop being a bigot and tarnishing your name". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Center_%28Philadelphia%29#Tenants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Center_%28Philadelphia... [1] Which says a lot about what they expect their business to be like in the near future.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism#Reception_and_political_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_ne...
jebblue 12y ago
I really wanted to check out their web site but it's on a CIDR banned in my firewall due to heavy spammer activity: http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/198.27.81.179 http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/198.27.81.179
gabriel34 12y ago
What is it about the telecom business that makes it so propense to local monopolies?
digikata 12y ago
It would be a great fundraising idea for an awareness day where providers to the FCC sold off "fast lane" bandwidth to protesters to the point it choked off their link. Proceeds to go to EFF, et al... Heck, sell off Whitehouse and congressional network "fast lane" bandwidth too.
adventured 12y ago
Why is it so commonly glossed over that Wheeler was nominated by President Obama? If this were the Bush White House, there would be endless press stories (and rightfully so) about cronyism and how Bush & Co. were in the pockets of big business. Meanwhile, the Obama DOJ is shortly going to allow a Comcast merger that will lock up the cable industry under a monopoly. The same Comcast that donates overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, and whose CEO is an Obama golfing buddy. Wheeler isn't the problem. The Obama White House is, they're directing all of this. How is it so many people are missing what's obviously occurring here.
- abjorn 12y ago
  If the right wing pundits were paying attention at all to net neutrality I'm sure they would be all over it. Instead they're more concerned with what people buy with food stamps.
- eddiedunn 12y ago
  Wheeler might not be the problem. But the Obama White house isn't the root of the problem, either. The American two party duocracy is. Sadly, it seems that the only viable option is to vote for either of two equally corrupt parties.
  - couchand 12y ago
    And in turn, the duocracy isn't the root of the problem, but rather our first-past-the-post voting system. Sadly, it seems the only viable option is to cry into my beer.
    - nb4hnp 12y ago
      That's the general feeling I get when trying to wrap my head around my country's [USA's] political system too.

282 points by kyledrake 12y ago

Cute.

mful 12y ago

This is a clever stunt, though I'm not sure how effective this strategy would be even on a more popular site. It seems unlikely that this form of protest would reach a large enough audience, given the relatively small number people who are directly affected, to gain any traction. EDIT: Grammar

Mithaldu 12y ago
Maybe they're hoping to inspire others to join them in this action, possibly leading to a key player treating the FCC like this. What's Google's stance on net neutrality nowadays?
- mful 12y ago
  That's exactly my point. I don't think just throttling the FCC employees is the best approach to taking a stance on net neutrality, regardless of the size of the 'key player'. I would argue that throttling consumers (with explanation) would be more effective.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  That worked for SOPA because a few congressmen were in highly contested districts already, and even losing 0.5% of their voters next election could ruin their chances of reelection. The FCC chairman is not elected. Nor is he appointed by Congress. They can all genuinely claim that they had little or no control over his decisions. So it does not matter if everyone pulls a stunt this time. Besides, if the man isn't lying and he somehow subverts state laws that prohibit municipal networks, then that more than makes up for any other wrong he has committed. I can sure as hell influence my city council more easily than I can influence the federal government.
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    "Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, with positions including President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA"
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
      What's your point? Instead of trying to make a logical argument, your comment seems designed to inspire some vague outrage.
  - tedchs 12y ago
    Just FYI, Congress does not appoint anyone. They confirm the President's appointments.
  - loumf 12y ago
    Generally the electorate is happy to punish their rep for anything the government is supposed to do. If Wikipedia.com, google.com, etc says your rep. isn't helping protect net-neutrality and to call them, then people will call. Enough calls, and congress drags in the FCC, starts passing laws, etc.
AimHere 12y ago
Well maybe there's room for mass action along these lines. If, some ISP, say, "Bombcast", decides to throttle some website, say "Slacker News" as part of an extortion plan, can't we have every other content-providing internet service - be it Wikipedia, reddit, AirBnB, Facebook, maybe even google, if they're on this side of the fight - throttle all of Bombcast's customers right back. Suddenly half of Bombcast's customers find their favourite sites moving at unacceptable speeds, with a black border around the edges and an annoying black popup window telling them exactly why their website access is being throttled, and recommending they switch to some less heinous ISP instead. Naturally, hit the FCC, any part of the US legislature that voted against Net Neutrality and so forth into the bargain. Force customers to choose between the faceless drones who laid the cable to their door ten years ago and send them a bill every month, or the guys who provide all the shiny internet stuffs that they enjoy for more or less free. Might some sort of content provider's union be quite powerful? Because of who they are, they have a head start at winning hearts and minds so they'd have leeway when it comes to taking action that might alienate their public.
- mful 12y ago
  I agree that this would make a lot of sense. Unless I misunderstood the OP, Neocities seems to be advocating for specifically throttling the FCC, not consumers in general. What you are describing seems to be more along the lines of Brad Feld's post[1] from the other day. [1] http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-demo-slow-lane.html http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-d...
- icehawk219 12y ago
  The problem with this plan is that Bombcast couldn't care less. They have a monopoly so what are their customers going to do? Switch to a non-existent ISP? And thanks to the death of Net Neutrality Bombcast can even go as far as to say "Hey Netflix, see this competitor of ours? Your rate just went up 250% if their customers are allowed on your site." (and for those thinking this would run afoul of anti-trust regulations you are 100% correct and I would LOVE to live in a universe where the government cared enough to do something about it, but I just can't believe that that would actually happen). ISPs have proven time and time again that they can't be bothered to care about their customers. So while I would like to see your idea come to fruition the only people who really lose are the customers. The ISP doesn't care, the FCC doesn't care, the rest of the government doesn't care, even the people don't care enough to do anything substantial.

wil421 12y ago

This sounds like a great plan but I think the FCC probably cares as much about access to neocities as they actually care about the consumers. If we could find a 3rd party the FCC depends on for their IT infrastructure and then limit that pipe, it might have some effect.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
Maybe it would be better to make it the whole federal government rather than just the FCC? That would at least get more people complaining (especially if more than just this site would do it).
- wil421 12y ago
  I love it. If the govt can shut itself down like last year then the people should be able deny them services.

valarauca1 12y ago

I would really like to see larger corporations like google, facebook, reddit, 4chan, etc. do this to anyone connection from a government end point for a day or two. Just make them see how bad removing net neutrality would be.

adrr 12y ago
I don't get why these companies just don't charge the cable companies for the right to carry their content. TV stations charge cable companies, cable company has a choice to not carry it but risk losing customers because they lack content. Content is king in this war .
- crashandburn4 12y ago
  The problem is that america is almost a monopoly, no other country really has these problems[0] [0] http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet-middleman/ http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-inte...
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Cheers for posting that, was pretty enlightening.
    - crashandburn4 12y ago
      No problem, I found it on hacker news and as always here the comments[0] are almost as enlightening as the piece itself. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699862
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        I'm in the UK and I thought the situation here was pretty terrible on the basis that if you go out into the sticks things get pretty slow. There's a joke, that BT develops core telecoms technologies and sells them across the world. Then when they are finally obsolete, it installs them in Britain. However it sounds like the US has cities running on worse than you get over here in farming villages.

viggity 12y ago

The internet has flourished because of a lack of regulation, not despite a lack of regulation. Let the companies duke it out and keep the government out of it. If I were in netflix's shoes I'd just charge each comcast customer enough extra to cover the surcharge and mark it clearly on their bill. Let comcast deal with the deluge of complaints to their call centers.

crashandburn4 12y ago
I actually really like the netflix idea but I still think net neutrality is too important to not be regulated, I wish netflix or someone similar would say "this is what we are going to do, here is comcasts customer support number, here is the FCC complaints department/whatever and here is a petition" in advance of the bill and actually mobilize some more people to do things and complain.
- ArtDev 12y ago
  Where is the army of lobbyists fighting for the internet? Didn't we learn anything from SOPA?
  - jchung 12y ago
    I think the answer you're looking for is: "Money".
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> If I were in netflix's shoes I'd just charge each comcast customer enough extra to cover the surcharge and mark it clearly on their bill. Let comcast deal with the deluge of complaints to their call centers. Nothing is more clear than the fact that Comcast cares nothing about customer service. American ISPs regularly appear at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys. They just don't care. Putting the charge on the customer's Netflix bill might be effective if it led the customer to conclude that switching ISPs in order to remove the charge would be cost effective. But when the customer has no viable alternative ISP, all it does is make Netflix more expensive. Since presumably Netflix is already charging the profit-maximizing price for its service, adding an additional charge would do nothing for Netflix but exceed the profit-maximizing price and cause it to lose money.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

__david__ 12y ago

I'd throttle the FCC. What is their internal IP block?

crazypyro 12y ago
Seriously, why doesn't the author release their internal IP block? This could create a valid way of protest against it. Hell, big name tech companies could get in on this.
- wfjackson 12y ago
  If some script kiddy on Reddit or Anonymous abuse that information "for the lulz" or "sake of the internetz" with DoS etc., the author would needlessly get into trouble since he got it confidentially.
  - crazypyro 12y ago
    I'm sure the author could have easily been creative enough to hide that he was his own source. Also are IPs really considered private information? I thought the whole point of IPs was they can be shared. A simple (probably flawed) example: "Oh hey, I found this pastebin with the FCC's IP block, don't know where it came from"
  - ohashi 12y ago
    It's not really secret, you can look it up on ARIN. EG: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-165-135-0-0-1/pft http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-165-135-0-0-1/pft
  - mnw21cam 12y ago
    It would be hilarious if someone was to try and DoS the FCC network, but were to be foiled by someone in-between them rate-limiting it to 28.8k.
benjarrell 12y ago
FCC (NET-165-135-0-0-1) 165.135.0.0 - 165.135.255.255 FCCNET2 (NET-192-133-125-0-1) 192.133.125.0 - 192.133.125.255 FCCNET (NET-192-104-54-0-1) 192.104.54.0 - 192.104.54.255 FCC2-126-30 (NET-4-21-126-0-1) 4.21.126.0 - 4.21.126.255 FCC (NET6-2620-610-1) 2620:0:610:: - 2620:0:610:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF SPRINTLINK (NET-208-23-64-0-1) 208.23.64.0 - 208.23.64.127 TBD (NET6-2600-803-230-1) 2600:803:230:: - 2600:803:230:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF Q0503-65-125-25-64 (NET-65-125-25-64-1) 65.125.25.64 - 65.125.25.127

wfjackson 12y ago

Isn't Neocities mostly text? In that case 28.8kbps is not going to be too much lag time. If that's the case they should add some latency instead, like 5 to 10 sec. That gets annoying quickly.

brokentone 12y ago

Can we open source this as a server module of some variety?

cordite 12y ago
What, and have a centralized registry of IP's to slow down?

clockworkelf 12y ago

Haha, Obama's "bad" pick. So Michael Taylor from Monsanto is a "good" pick for the FDA?

rynes 12y ago

$1,000 is way too low - any lobbyist has more than that in his pants for "walking around money." They spend more than that taking a Govt. Official to lunch.

walden42 12y ago
No, they shouldn't be able to pay to get full service back. Paying any sum of money does not come from their pockets, but from taxpayer pockets. They'd pay any price and not care one bit.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Nice idea, would probably work if a big player like google or facebook did it.

therogerwilco 12y ago

/clap

ohashi 12y ago

So how would you implement this on other sites? People started a campaign with JS snippet last time for SOPA. Would this be an apache/nginx line? I'm actually not sure how I would go about throttling IPs from my server.

bcRIPster 12y ago

The more I think about it, the only way you're going to get movement on this is to get people pissed off, and for that to happen, someone like Google would need to apply this throttle to EVERYONE along with a link to a page where they could mock pay to have their speed restored. Now that would get some attention.

junto 12y ago

Cloudflare need a one click opt-in button in their client admin, to turn on such a feature for anyone to do with promoting anti-net-neutrality. I'd enable that setting and I imagine lots of others would. I imagine Cloudflare already have a lot of sites under their control.

arh68 12y ago
Who's going to maintain the uh, brownlist?
- junto 12y ago
  Crowd-sourced? Shall we start one somewhere? Let's start with Comcast's headquarters... :-)
chimeracoder 12y ago
> I'd enable that setting and I imagine lots of others would I absolutely would - I run a few sites under Cloudflare. Instead of slowing down the traffic coming from the FCC (which is likely to be small), I'd recommend throttling by geography. For example, Comcast is based in Philadelphia (they already own the tallest building in Philadelphia[0], and are building another even larger one[0]). I imagine (e.g.) the denizens of Philadelphia would become a lot more vocal in their support for net neutrality with their elected officials if they started getting throttled. You could say that it's unfair to pick on Philadelphians when they haven't done anything wrong themselves. I'd agree, but on the other hand, that's what makes this so effective - it shows people how unjust and unfair the concept of content-based throttling is. It reminds me of Dan Savage's response to a poor woman who happened to share a last name with Rick Santorum, and wrote to him asking him to stop dragging her name through the mud[2], as she was only distantly related to him. His response was something along the lines of, "Instead of writing to me asking me to stop, write to him and ask him to stop being a bigot and tarnishing your name". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Center_%28Philadelphia%29#Tenants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Center_%28Philadelphia... [1] Which says a lot about what they expect their business to be like in the near future.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism#Reception_and_political_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_ne...

jebblue 12y ago

I really wanted to check out their web site but it's on a CIDR banned in my firewall due to heavy spammer activity: http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/198.27.81.179 http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/198.27.81.179

gabriel34 12y ago

What is it about the telecom business that makes it so propense to local monopolies?

digikata 12y ago

It would be a great fundraising idea for an awareness day where providers to the FCC sold off "fast lane" bandwidth to protesters to the point it choked off their link. Proceeds to go to EFF, et al... Heck, sell off Whitehouse and congressional network "fast lane" bandwidth too.

adventured 12y ago

Why is it so commonly glossed over that Wheeler was nominated by President Obama? If this were the Bush White House, there would be endless press stories (and rightfully so) about cronyism and how Bush & Co. were in the pockets of big business. Meanwhile, the Obama DOJ is shortly going to allow a Comcast merger that will lock up the cable industry under a monopoly. The same Comcast that donates overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, and whose CEO is an Obama golfing buddy. Wheeler isn't the problem. The Obama White House is, they're directing all of this. How is it so many people are missing what's obviously occurring here.

abjorn 12y ago
If the right wing pundits were paying attention at all to net neutrality I'm sure they would be all over it. Instead they're more concerned with what people buy with food stamps.
eddiedunn 12y ago
Wheeler might not be the problem. But the Obama White house isn't the root of the problem, either. The American two party duocracy is. Sadly, it seems that the only viable option is to vote for either of two equally corrupt parties.
- couchand 12y ago
  And in turn, the duocracy isn't the root of the problem, but rather our first-past-the-post voting system. Sadly, it seems the only viable option is to cry into my beer.
  - nb4hnp 12y ago
    That's the general feeling I get when trying to wrap my head around my country's [USA's] political system too.