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Cloudflare Might Be Exploring a Way To Slow Down FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's Home Internet Speeds (twitter.com)
Late Wednesday night, TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine pleaded to tech billionaires to purchase local ISPs near FCC chairman Ajit Pai's home and slow down his Internet speeds. One of the responders to that tweet was Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive of Cloudflare, who said: I could do this in a different, but equally effective, way. Sent note to our GC to see if we can without breaking any laws. In a statement to Slashdot, Mr. Prince said: Probably the easiest thing would be to slow down requests from the FCC's IP ranges. Or put up an interstitial whenever someone from those IPs visits a site behind us. I think it's less likely we'd do it across the board ourselves, more likely we'd implement it as an option our customers could opt in to. Basically taking this a step further.
Just wait until he makes this legal, and then do it.
"Buy up all ISPs in his area..." Soooo... just Comcast then?
Sorry, but the phone company is still a utility and can't deny service.
They don't have to deny service. Just QoS him down to 300 baud. They can say that his circuit is overloaded, but they won't fix it. By Pai's own rules, that is perfectly fair. And since he won't have a choice of ISP's (which, by his own words, is thriving competition), he's stuck at a permanent 300 baud.
I for one will enjoy the civil suit that follows. Of course we know this is just a bunch of kids throwing a tantrum. Nevermind the fact that they are of adult age.
I prefer to think of it as an experiment in demonstrating access in a post-net-neutrality world to a fixed sample sized demographic in order to obtain sociological impact data to the proposed rule changes.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Let's just agree on "A speed slow enough to do the TCP handshake with actual hands".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know. It seems like if CloudFlare can legally slow down traffic of any arbitrary individual they don't like, legally, we've already lost the battle. They just haven't figured out how to properly monetize that ability yet.
a punishment for inflicting damage on the Internet.
The Net interprets Ajit Pai as damage and routes around him.
[Apologies to John Gilmore.]
Have gnu, will travel.