Today in poetic justice, Web hosting service Neocities.org has crippled the FCC’s Internet access, throttling the agency’s private network to dial-up, ’90s-era speeds of 28.8 kbps in a Net neutrality protest.
In a blog post on the company’s website, Neocities creator Kyle Drake called the FCC’s controversial proposals, which would allow ISPs to create Internet “fast lanes” for large corporations that can afford to pay, “idiotic and insane.” He also criticized FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, whom he called a “bonehead” and a “cable industry hand-picked lobbyist.”
“The FCC isn’t doing their job of protecting American consumers, or producers like Neocitites users. 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 said.
“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 28.8-kbps 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.”
Drake said that he would let the FCC merge back onto the info superhighway’s fast lanes only if the agency pays for what he calls a “Ferengi plan.” The scheme is named after a fictional alien race from Star Trek. In the series, the Ferengis are known for being shady merchants and forcing women into prostitution.
“The Ferengi plan is a special FCC-only plan that costs $1,000 per year, and removes the 28.8-kbps 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),” Drake said.
Drake refused to reveal his source for the FCC IP range; however, the list has been uploaded on Hacker News (you can find it here). Neocities has also posted the code used on its Github page, and have urged people to make their own Ferengi plan.
If you want to protest the FCC proposal the old fashioned way, there’s still time before the commission votes on the draft on May 15. The FCC just announced that it has opened a new inbox for comments. To add your statement to the list, shoot an email to openinternet@fcc.gov.
Your comment will be made public, however, so you might want to be polite. Just sayin’.
