Mashable
ohn Oliver called for his viewers to rise up against the Federal Communications Commission's proposed net neutrality rules at the end of an epic, 13-minute rant on Sunday — and commenters responded en masse.
The FCC's online commenting system went down on Monday for "a few hours" due to "unusually heavy traffic," the FCC's press secretary Kim Hart confirmed to Mashable. The system received 22,257 comments over the last two days, almost as many as the FCC had previously received — before the weekend, the total was around 25,000, Hart said.
Overall, as of Monday, Hart said the FCC has received 64,400 comments, including those sent after the commission put out a public notice on February 19. The 22,257 comments submitted in the last two days, therefore, constitute one third of the total posted on the site in the last few months. The commission has also received 301,000 comments via email.
Hart, however, added that "there's really no way of knowing if it was directly caused by [the John Oliver segment]" and that "the site has experienced lag times like this before due to high volumes of traffic around other hotly debated issues."
It's impossible to know whether the site went down because netizens swarmed it to support net neutrality and protest against a potential rule change that critics say would allow for the creation of so-called fast lanes for those with deep pockets. But, if the comment surge wasn't due to Oliver, it would be an awfully big coincidence.
Following Oliver's rant, before the outage on Monday, Redditors also pushed for people to comment. When the site went down, some Redditors called it the Reddit "hug of death" — the community's slang for crashing a site by overloading it with traffic.
When we tried accessing the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System on Tuesday afternoon, the site was slow to load, but the system, according to the FCC, was fully restored.
The comments submitted range from civilized protests, to calls for the FCC to reclassify broadband as a public utility (a solution many net neutrality supporters are advocating for), to NSFW rants.
"The new net neutrality rules will destroy openness and give an unfair advantage to corporations with the biggest bankroll. Please don't let this happen. Please don't kill the Internet," read one of the comments.
"F*CK THIS BULLSH*T. YOU GUYS BETTER NOT F*CKING CHANGE THIS SH*T. F*CK THE CABLE COMPANIES. KEEP THE INTERNET FREE!!! NET NEUTRALITY!!!!!!" read another comment.
The docket on net neutrality has by far most comments in the system — the next highest has received only 1,678 comments.
The FCC opened a public commenting period on the proposal on May 15, which will run through June 27. People can comment through the FCC's online system, or via email to openinternet@fcc.gov. All comments will be part of the official record, although it might take a while for them to be uploaded to the commenting system, Hart said.
As for HBO, a spokesperson simply told Mashable that “the network is happy that the show is attracting a lot of passionate viewers."
