The net neutrality fight is unfortunately back, and just as he did three years ago, comedian John Oliver has devoted a segment of his show Last Week Tonight to call out the importance of the open internet and encourage viewers to comment on the new proposed rules.
In the new segment, Oliver highlights the current issues with net neutrality, including Verizon’s recent misleading video defending the company’s viewpoint for net neutrality (ignoring the fact that Verizon is responsible for forcing internet to be classified as Title II in the first place) and Ajit Pai’s new plan to reverse Title II net neutrality (and his not-at-all reassuring plan to rely on terms of service instead). If you’ve been out of the loop on the latest when it comes to the fight for net neutrality, Oliver’s clip is a good recap of where things stand today.
Related FCC announces plan to reverse Title II net neutrality
Oliver’s original video (in which he infamously compared then FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler as a “dingo” and appealed to internet trolls to channel their efforts into something useful) was undeniably successful, resulting in over 45,000 comments getting posted to the FCC’s website within hours of the clip airing, and even crashing the FCC’s site.
And, like last time, Oliver is once again rallying viewers to go comment on the FCC’s website — even buying a helpful redirection URL of www.gofccyourself.com to make it easier to find the comment form.
Late Sunday night and Monday morning, the website of the United States  (FCC) became unresponsive, which interfered with attempts by the public to express their views on the proposals currently up for comment, including one about .  Although comedian  on his show '''' had asked his viewers to inundate the website with comments supporting Net Neutrality, the FCC says a DDoS () cyberattack, not angry  fans, are responsible for their website's issues.

John Oliver in 2013.
FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray explained in a formal statement that FCC.gov's problems did not come from a large volume of complaints and comments, which is what Oliver had asked his fans to make, but from sabotage. "These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC," said Bray.

Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet providers should not be allowed to speed up or slow down access to certain websites, which would presumably be done for payment.  In 2014, the U.S. government ruled Internet providers must be held to standards similar to those of telephone companies and changed their legal classification to fall under Title II of the , which gave the FCC the legal authority to order them not to give preferential treatment to high-paying customers.

In response to a previous Net Neutrality proposal in 2014, John Oliver did a segment on the fifth episode of ''Last Week Tonight'' explaining the difference between Title I and Title II status and asking his viewers to flood the FCC's websites with comments supporting regulation.  Approximately 4 million did so, and the website crashed.  Sunday night, Oliver asked the public to repeat the performance, recommending comments to make and providing a single link to take them to the exact part of FCC.gov required: "America needs you to rise — or more accurately, remain seated in front of your computer screen — to this occasion," said Oliver on the air. "So please, fly my pretties, fly once more!" Again, the FCC website soon suffered problems.

Despite Sunday night's issues, the FCC still received tens of thousands of comments on the proposed relaxing of the 2014 regulations, which is up for a vote on May 18.


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