So by now you've probably seen the John Oliver net neutrality clip, or at least the "cable company" line everyone's been quoting for the last week. If you haven't: go watch it. Thirteen minutes, aired on Last Week Tonight last Sunday, and it is somehow both extremely funny and extremely correct about what Comcast and Time Warner Cable are trying to pull with the FCC's proposed rules. He ends the segment by asking actual human trolls to go leave comments on the FCC's website instead of doing whatever it is they normally do with their free time.
They did. Oh man, they did.
The FCC's comment system (it's this creaky thing called ECFS, looks like it was built around 2004 and never touched again) started falling over within a day or two. There were reports of the site timing out, throwing errors, just generally not able to handle however many thousands of people showed up all wanting to type "net neutrality good, comcast bad" into a government form at the same time. The FCC eventually put out a statement basically admitting the surge broke things. I don't think anyone at that agency expected a British guy on a premium cable show to be the reason their servers caught fire.
I love this, honestly, and not just because I think Oliver's right on the substance (I do — I've had Time Warner Cable for four years now and my upload speed has never once matched what I'm paying $74.99 a month for, so I'm not exactly a neutral party here, pun sort of intended). What gets me is the mechanism. This is a federal rulemaking comment period, the most boring possible artifact of American bureaucracy, the kind of thing that usually gets maybe a few hundred submissions from telecom lawyers and the occasional EFF staffer. And a comedy show turned it into something that crashed a government website. That's a genuinely new kind of thing. Cable news segments don't do that. A really good blog post doesn't do that (trust me, I'd know, nobody's crashed anything reading this).
Whether it actually changes anything is a separate question and I'm not going to pretend I know the answer. Chairman Wheeler's original proposal still has language in it that would let ISPs charge companies like Netflix for a fast lane, and public comments, even a genuinely enormous pile of them, don't legally bind the agency to do anything different. The comment period isn't even closed yet. People are going to keep submitting through the summer from what I understand, so the actual number by the time it's tallied up is going to be something absurd.
But there's something satisfying about watching an ordinary Tuesday task, "please increase government server capacity," get triggered by pure public annoyance instead of a lobbying campaign. Usually it runs the other way. Usually it's the ISPs with the lawyers and the comment-flooding bots and the "grassroots" astroturf letter campaigns, and here it's just a few million people who are sick of paying too much for internet that buffers during Game of Thrones.
Small thing I keep thinking about: I wonder how many of those comments are actually substantive versus just some variation of a joke from the segment. Doesn't really matter for the point Oliver was making, but if you're the poor FCC staffer whose job is reading through submissions before some arbitrary deadline, I do not envy you right now. That's a rough week of work. Somebody in DC is opening a spreadsheet full of "comcast can DIE" over and over and getting paid federal wages to sort it into a report.
Anyway. If you haven't filed a comment yourself, the window's still open, it takes about four minutes, and no, you don't need to be clever about it. Just say what you actually think. I did mine on Thursday and it wasn't complicated — I said I don't want to pay extra so Netflix loads properly, which is apparently a controversial position that a multi-billion dollar industry is currently lobbying hard against.
Go watch the clip if you haven't. Then go file the comment. The site might even still be a little slow, which honestly feels like the appropriate protest.