Net Neutrality Debate: FCC Says Comment Site Hit By DDoS Attack After John Oliver Segment

The Federal Communications Commission reported Monday that its system for public comment was hit by an orchestrated distributed denial-of-service attack that made the website inaccessible.

The attack reportedly began Sunday evening, and was originally believed to be a flood of incoming commenters directed to the site by John Oliver, who dedicated a segment of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to encouraging viewers to leave comments on the FCC’s site to persuade the agency to keep intact current net neutrality rules.

Read: Net Neutrality Rules: Title II To Be Reversed Under FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's Plan

“Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), Federal Communications Commission Chief Information Officer Dr. David Bray said in a statement.

“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.”

Bray said the comment site itself remained online for the entirety of the attack, but the flood of traffic made it impossible for legitimate commenters to submit their remarks.

The FCC said it is working with commercial partners to address the situation and “will continue to monitor developments going forward.” For the time being, the site appears to be online and functional.

Read: John Oliver And Net Neutrality: FCC Site Crashes After 'Last Week Tonight' Segment

The FCC has not provided any comment on the segment from Oliver’s show, nor any relation to it and the sudden influx of traffic that hit the commission’s servers. Oliver had set up a website, gofccyourself.com, that automatically redirects visitors to the FCC page to leave a comment on the commission’s current net neutrality proceeding.

Under the newly proposed rules, laid out by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai late last month, the FCC would undo the Open Internet Order passed by the FCC under the Barack Obama administration that classified the internet as a public utility.

That 2015 ruling, passed by then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, reclassified internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, which allowed the FCC to regulate the companies to ensure they adhered to the tenets of net neutrality.

Under net neutrality rules, ISPs are forbidden from blocking content, throttling or slowing internet speeds, and providing paid prioritization to certain services that are willing to pay for favorable treatment. In effect, it requires all data be treated as equal.

Under the plan of Chairman Pai, the FCC would classify the internet as an information service under Title I of the Communications act, removing the commission’s ability to enforce regulations on ISPs and essentially leaving enforcement up to an honor system.

The Chairman has also floated the possibility of directly undermining the tenet of no paid prioritization by allowing practices like zero-rating, in which ISPs and mobile carriers don’t count use of certain services—often ones they own—against a user’s data limits.

Oliver’s segment, a rehash of his 2014 segment that encouraged people to push the FCC to pass the original Open Internet Order, once again called for viewers to comment on the FCC’s site to tell the commission not to change the rules. In 2014, Oliver’s attention on the issue resulted in the comment site crashing.