fcc
- “Heavy traffic” is rush hour on the freeway.
- “DDoS” is a mass protest with people physically blocking lanes on the road.
Heavy traffic is not a DDoS
Ajit Pai claimed that when the FCC asked citizens to comment on Net Neutrality, their website was attacked with a distributed denial of service, or DDoS. I’ve heard many of his defenders claim that an overwhelming number of people trying to use the website to comment was in fact a DDoS. This is a lie.
It was not a kind of DDoS. Words mean things, and “DDoS” specifically means a coordinated attack. What the FCC experienced is what we call “heavy traffic”. A car analogy:
Even though the end result might be everything moving slower than desired, if you’re stuck in traffic but you tell your boss that you’re late to work because a protest blocked the street, you’re exactly as much a liar as Ajit Pai was when he perjured himself to Congress.
My FCC Net Neutrality Letter
This is my letter to the FCC on September 12, 2014 regarding the upcoming net neutrality decision making process:
I am a Comcast customer, and I am paying them for a 100 million bit per second connection. Comcast has a monthly data cap of 300 billion bytes (or about 3 trillion bits) per month. At the speeds I’m paying full price for, I can use up my entire monthly data allotment in about 8 hours.
More simply, my monthly Comcast payment entitles me to use my Internet connection at full speed for one third of one day per month.
Esteemed colleagues, I find it disingenuous that Comcast and their peers claim that they need to charge more to carry the services I want to use, all while constricting my paid usage to one ninetieth of my connection’s capacity and raking in record profits. There is simply no fiscal credibility to their claims and I urge you to look upon them with due skepticism.
The FCC has received millions of letters supporting net neutrality rules against Internet slow lanes. Most of these have been form letters written by various citizen-friendly organizations and submitted by casual site visitors. Most of the individually written letters are various restatements of why net neutrality is important. All of those are good, but it’s also important to remind readers of these letters that anti-free-market groups like NCTA and its constituents have no legitimate counterarguments. They claim to need Internet slow and fast lanes to make money, but the industry makes huge amounts of money while delivering some of the worst Internet service in the developed world.
Comcast earned 3.3 billion dollars in net income in the second quarter of 2014, all while allowing customers to use only one ninetieth of the utility they’ve paid for. The only valid explanation for their strident opposition to net neutrality is sheer greed.