Web host slows FCC site to 28.8 kbits/s as part of net neutrality protest

If you’ve been on the web this past week, then you’ve probably been exposed to the Tom Wheeler / Internet “fast lane” proposal story.

If you haven’t, then in short, FCC Chairman Wheeler has proposed a law that would allow Internet providers (Comcast, Verizon, Optimum, etc.) to charge Web services for priority access to consumers. Those who do not pay the providers would see their site relegated to an operating speed slower than those who do pay.

The proposal has drawn the ire of Web sites big and small, and just the other day, a letter signed by more than 100 of the biggest technology companies was sent to the nation’s capital protesting the law. Specifically, the letter stated the Web should remain neutral for all sites, and that traffic should be treated equally.

One web hosting service decided to take their protest a step further, though. Instead of writing a letter to Wheeler, NeoCities did some research and discovered the FCC’s internal IP address. Armed with this information ,the site turned around and slowed all of its connections down to 28.8Kbps speeds—or the speed we enjoyed back in the Internet’s dial-up days. 

“Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's internet slow and expensive forever' lobby,” NeoCities creator Kyle Drake wrote yesterday.

For those unfamiliar with Drake’s site, NeoCities offers free and paid Web hosting. He noted in his protest that FCC access to his site is being slowed down on the homepage only, and not on websites created by NeoCities users.

Translation: his action is more of a superficial protest. It’s an effective one, nonetheless, because it outright demonstrates what the Internet could be like should the law be passed. 

Drake added that, in his opinion, Wheeler is a “cable industry hand-picked lobbyist”, adding that the FCC won’t protect US consumers because “they got a dump truck full of money from the cable corporation lobby.”

“If it bothers you that I'm doing this, I want to point out that everyone is going to be doing (expletive) like this after the FCC rips apart Net Neutrality,” he wrote. “It's time for the Web to organize and stand up against these thugs before they ruin everything that the Web stands for.”

Drake concluded by putting his FCC Nginx code on GitHub for owners of other sites to use it as well. 

Story via arstechnica.com