Former Daily Show comedian John Oliver devoted 13 minutes of his new HBO show Last Week Tonight on Sunday to explaining the Federal Communications Commission's upcoming ruling on Net neutrality. Oliver explained that ending Net neutrality would create an "egregious" two-tier system whereby Internet providers could charge companies more for faster delivery speeds. Net neutrality, he said, is all that is "preventing cable company f**kery."
He ended the monologue with a plea to Internet trolls everywhere to “once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction,” and pointed his audience to the FCC's public comments website, FCC.gov/comments. It apparently worked.
The FCC’s comments section was reportedly down for a few hours on Monday, and the FCC’s Twitter account sent out two tweets indicating that “technical difficulties” due to "heavy traffic" had been affecting its servers.
We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system due to heavy traffic. We’re working to resolve these issues quickly.
— The FCC (@FCC) June 2, 2014
We’re still experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system. Thanks for your patience as we work to resolve the issues.
— The FCC (@FCC) June 2, 2014
The irony was not lost on Twitter users.
@FCC is Comcast throttling your bandwith?
— Ryan Wyatt (@Fwiz) June 3, 2014
@FCC Don't worry. If you pay $8M more to Comcast you might get a better connection. They might even throw in a $4M/m server lease agreement.
— Richard Risner (@Kowder) June 2, 2014
The FCC’s open commenting period on the Net neutrality debate ends June 27.
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