Thank You, Phish Fans, For Caring About Net Neutrality (theoutline.com)

If you venture over to Battle For the Net, which encourages internet users to call Congress to advocate for the preservation of net neutrality rules, you'll find something peculiar: Several of the top sites that direct calls are Phish-related. (Phish is an American rock band.) From a report: As someone on Twitter pointed out, the traffic from phish.net -- which describes itself as "a non-commercial project run by Phish fans and for Phish fans" -- appears to be coming from a pop-up message that greets visitors to the site. The same pop-up, which directs to www.battleforthenet.com, appears when you visit the site's forums and setlist pages. So, it appears that Phish fans, while in the midst of discussing their favorite extended noodling sessions, are leading the charge to save us from our impending telecom-dominated hellscape. Thanks, guys!" Phish.net sees over 400,000 unique visitors each month, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In July, the website served over one million unique visitors.

Comments

Re:Phish?

[mejustme]

Wikipedia to the rescue: "Phish is an American rock band that was founded at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont in 1983. The band is known for musical improvisation, extended jams, blending of genres, and a dedicated fan base."

Seems to me the Slashdot editors could have beefed up the summary a bit.

Re: Phish?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Since you obviously weren't around then, allow me to teach you a bit of history: Network neutrality was the original state of affairs, and it was self-enforcing until all the independent ISPs got bought up or run out of business by conglomerates.

Re:Thanks, Phish fans

[thomst]

ScentCone blathered:

Thanks, Phish fans, for your hipster disdain for those deplorable people in flyover country. You know, the ones that will only ever get usable internet access when small, local ISPs provide it to them. But who can't possibly throw Comcast- or Verizon-sized corporate budgets at the compliance costs of an intrusive regulator regime, and who can't trot out things like fixed wireless solutions with modest backhaul without reserving the right to shape their traffic to best serve their smaller groups of customers at rational prices. Thanks, Phish fans, for doing the bidding of two or three giant corporations! You're the best.

In other news: black is white, up is down, and the speed of light is regulated by the FCC.

I happen to live in rural Ohio, where the iLEC does its "traffic shaping" by hard-limiting DSL to 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM for folks who live outside of the city limits. It doesn't have to do that, because it runs fiber to the DSLAM, but its NOC operators are paint-by-number idiots, managed by an incompetent nincompoop who got his job via nepotism.

Note that this iLEC basically owns rural southern Ohio. It offers higher speeds within city limits, because it has to try to compete with Time Warner/Spectrum there - and is hemmorhaging customers to EvilCorp, because TW/Spectrum's current entry-level service is nominally 100mbit (in practice, it's closer to 120mbit, as measured by me via DSLspeed).

You are advocating the entire country be held hostage by the mega-ISPs for the dubious benefit of rural incumbents, most of whom couldn't find their asses with both hands and a GPS, technically speaking.

Oh, and most Phish fans are hipsters in the same sense that Jerry Garcia was a military strategist ...