FCC’s comment system targeted by DDoS during filing period for net neutrality

> If people are against this en masse -- he won't touch it. My guess is he backs down or takes a neutral stance, just like Wheeler did on net neutrality, and like Obama did on encryption.

Wheeler did not take a neutral stance. He was always for net neutrality. Some people were confused on that point because after the courts tossed out the Open Internet Order of 2010, Wheeler's first proposed replacement was weaker. In particular, it would have allowed paid "fast lanes".

It was weaker not because he preferred weaker net neutrality, but rather because he wanted to try to save net neutrality using the same legal authority that the 2010 order used, if he could. That would be very likely to survive further judicial scrutiny, and also not to draw to much Congressional ire.

But from the start he said he was open to reclassifying ISPs as Title II common carriers in order to make a new order that was stronger than the 2010. The public comments were overwhelmingly in favor of that, and that's what he went with.

People also get confused about Wheeler's intentions because he was once head of the main cable trade association, and later head of the main cellular/wireless trade association. What is often overlooked is that at those times, those industries were young, small, and trying to compete against big established players (broadcast networks in the case of cable, the big telephone companies in the case of cellular/wireless). Fighting for cable and wireless was the pro-consumer, pro-competition side at the time.

In Wheeler's own words:

Wheeler> You have to think about what I was lobbying for. The cable industry at that point in time was fighting being put out of business by this agency at the request of the broadcasters. Broadcasters wanted to shut down the cable companies. They didn't want to give them access to programming because they didn’t want the content in the market, the competition in the market. And so I joined a crusade—we called it ‘plant a flower in the vast wasteland’—to have choice for Americans in what they see on television.

See this interview if you want to understand Wheeler:

https://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyi...

This is the US government, which generally procures according to the lowest bidder. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is business as usual.

And the official statement from the FCC,

> “Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.” [1]

Given that the FCC thinks "bulk commenting" via a spreadsheet is a proper solution to their website difficulties, I don't really believe in their ability to diagnose an issue as a DDoS. More likely, lots of people were trying to comment but couldn't.

[1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

I mean, civil disobedience is basically a physical DDoS against government.

It's also the corps with money: Pay for preferred treatment and raise the barrier to entry for any competitor. Given how Microsoft reacted when they saw their greatest enemy as "some kid in their garage brewing the next killer app", that's a very real concern.