Net neutrality fans' joy as '2.3 million email' flood hits US Congress This week's internet slowdown protest has been, as one might expect, declared a roaring success by its organizers, after US watchdog the FCC was once again forced to change its comment policy under a deluge of opinions. Organizing group BattleForTheNet said 2,039,500 people took part in the September 10th day-long campaign, …
In the late 90's I used to envy your connectivity in the states, Cable and ADSL was a wet dream for most wanna-be geeks in the UK. I honestly don't understand the full situation, but after everything I've read I think the FCC could take lessons from the UK and other EU models.
Since OFCOM (the UK's equivalent of the FCC) forced BT to separate infrastructure and customer operations, and allow competitors access to that infrastructure, it has meant other ISPs could compete and even install their own equipment in the BT exchanges, which was a driving factor for ADSL2+, and now they're fairly well advanced in rolling out VDSL/FTTC (Ironically, they missed my f*cking street!).
It still suck a$$ compared to some of the connectivity you hear about in Asia.. but thats life!
we've demanded that since 1997. the result has been DSL falling by the wayside and being replaced with cable and Ethernet.
DSL has been open access since then, and has seen tons of money go down the tubes, taking many small companies with it, as they fail to be able to deal with the realities of the limitations involved in serving customers that are spread far and wide, geographically, with a technology that was simply not up to the task.
"The FC just realized what happens if everyone can sent unlimited numbers of emails....." Please do some research - the daily email traffic in the US is in the hundreds of billions of emails, so 2m is a drop in an ocean. Usually, when dealing with email bombing (sorry, 'legitimate protest'), the limiting factor is the max size of the targeted client's mailbox, 20GB being the figure I recall from Exchange and Outlook 2007, which was the last time I bothered worrying about such an attack. The factor I have found to be the issue is the performance of the disk system in the Exchange server, but seeing as most government organisations attach them to at least NAS arrays if not full-on SAN arrays, dealing with 2m emails is hardly an issue.
You then also have to consider two other important factors - firstly, many organisations now have email monitoring and security software which will identify and nullify mass email attacks; secondly, if you advertise your protest as intended to overwhelm someone's email system then, by the laws of most Western countries, you are organizing a denial of service, which is a criminal act even if your target negates the effects of your protest.
FCC Boss - 2.3 million? Excellent, tell 'em that guarantees them a seat at the table when the bidding war <cough> I mean discussion starts.
FCC Underling - Erm, sorry, that's 2.3 million emails to Congress, Sir.
FCC Boss - Emails? I thought they said dollars. Oh well, at least it's not us having to delete them all...
Ooh, 2m! Wow! So pathetic. The US population is about 350m, so even if pretend all those participants were US citizens, it is still a fraction of one percent of the population could be bothered enough to send one email. The more likely reality is that 2m also includes a good number of double emailers and bots.
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