HBO’s John Oliver sharply criticized the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for its efforts in repealing net neutrality regulations. The FCC’s website then crashed.
Oliver is believed to have made net neutrality a front-and-center issue in 2014 by advocating for the regulations, resulting in almost four million people commenting in favor of the regulations before the FCC eventually approved them in 2015. Now Oliver seems to have done something similar in calling for net neutrality to be saved from now-FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who plans to scrap them.
The alleged comedian called on his viewers to go to a website called GoFCCYourself.com to submit their comments in favor of maintaining net neutrality regulations.
“Don’t tell me you don’t have the time to do this,” Oliver said. “If the Internet is evidence of nothing else, it’s evidence that we all have way too much time on our hands. Yes, I’m talking to you, everyone who posts ‘May the 4th be with you’ on Star Wars Day. You cannot say you’re too busy when 540,000 of you commented on Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement, and only 673 of you took the time to review the Grand Canyon on Yelp — seven of whom gave it a one-star review.”
Oliver added, “America needs you to rise — or more accurately, remain seated in front of your computer screen — to this occasion. So please, fly my pretties, fly once more!”
According to The Washington Post, which was naturally quite favorable toward Oliver’s rant, the comments section on the FCC website “loaded intermittently — sometimes not at all, sometimes just slowly” on Monday. The FCC is claiming that they were the target of “multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks” that flooded “the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”
Still, Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality “has received more than 100,000 comments since Sunday, a sign of intense interest in a proposal that could reshape the future of the internet,” according to Reuters.
Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro once noted that “Oliver belongs to a class of British people who think that they are smarter than everyone else by dint of their accent” and that “he doesn’t know much about politics generally.” This explains why Oliver is completely wrong on the issue of net neutrality.
The heart of Oliver’s argument is that the regulations are necessary to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from “slowing down access to less popular sites,” but this is a problem that doesn’t exist. As The Hill‘s David Balto pointed out, “The truth is there are no slow lanes at all on the internet anymore; we are entering the ‘gigabit era.'”
Net neutrality is really about expanding government control, as the regulations enable the FCC to become “the ultimate arbiter of which tradeoffs and business models are acceptable,” which crowds out “smaller ISPs” that don’t have the resources to wade through the FCC’s bureaucracy.
Ultimately, Oliver’s efforts to save net neutrality may be prove to be futile, as Pai seems committed to repealing them even if he faces public backlash, but it is disconcerting that someone as ill-informed on politics as Oliver may be capable of crashing the FCC’s website.