Web hosting company NeoCities is throttling all connections from the FCC to its site to 28.8kbps, until the FCC signs up for an exclusive, $1000 a year subscription plan to remove the cap.
Lots of companies on the web are complaining about the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to trash net neutrality, but one of them is actually doing something about it. NeoCities, a free, open-source web hosting company, has dropped the hammer on connections from the FCC to its site.
“I’ve (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC’s internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I’m not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they’ve been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the ‘keep America’s internet slow and expensive forever’ lobby,” NeoCities founder Kyle Drake wrote in a blog post.
“The Ferengi plan is a special FCC-only plan that costs $1000 per year, and removes the 28.8kbps modem throttle to the FCC. We will happily take Credit Cards, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin from crooked FCC executives that probably have plenty of money from bribes on our Donations page,” he continued. “If it bothers you that I’m doing this, I want to point out that everyone is going to be doing crap like this after the FCC rips apart Net Neutrality. It’s time for the web to organize and stand up against these thugs before they ruin everything that the web stands for.”
Despite Drake’s optimism, it’s unlikely that the FCC is spending too much time surfing NeoCities sites, so in order to assist others who want to creat their own “FCC Ferengi Plan,” he posted a link to the throttle code he’s using on NeoCities’ nginx server. According to Softpedia, “site owners around the globe” are joining his crusade, although actual numbers aren’t available since most of the claims are coming out of a Reddit thread; regardless, many comments in the thread note that until major players like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Netflix and others (particularly adult sites – as one person noted, “If porn sites did this, net neutrality would be fixed in a day”) get involved, the practical effect will be nil. But it’s a start.
Source: NeoCities
Published: May 9, 2014 03:50 pm