Web Host Protests Botched Net Neutrality By Throttling FCC To Dial-Up Speeds

NeoCities’ generous offer to lift the throttling for an annual fee of $1,000.

The FCC’s pending net neutrality proposal would allow Internet service providers to provide “fast lane” access to websites and online services willing to pay a premium. In response to this idea, which is counter the entire notion of an open Internet, the folks at one web hosting service have decided to open a “slow lane” just for people working at the FCC.

In a blog post yesterday, web host NeoCities explained that, through correspondence, it had identified the FCC’s internal IP block and “throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds” to the NeoCities.org homepage (but not to any of the sites hosted by NeoCities, because that would not be cool to do without their say-so).

“The FCC isn’t doing their job of protecting American consumers, or producers like Neocities users,” writes the company’s Kyle Drake. “Perhaps they got a dump truck full of money from the cable corporation lobby, or perhaps they’re too busy surfing Neocities sites. Well either way, it looks like they need some help remembering what their job is.”

Drake says he won’t lift the throttling “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.”

To that end, NeoCities is offering Wheeler, et al, what it dubs The Ferengi Plan:

The Ferengi plan is a special FCC-only plan that costs $1000 per year, and removes the 28.8kbps modem throttle to the FCC. We will happily take Credit Cards, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin from crooked FCC executives that probably have plenty of money from bribes on our Donations page (sorry, we don’t accept Latinum yet).

Granted, it’s not like the NeoCities homepage is Buzzfeed or TMZ, both of which we just assume are bookmarked on FCC Chair Tom Wheeler’s browser, but the company has posted the code it used for this protest on Github in case any sites want to throttle FCC access for fun.

[via ArsTechnica]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist