John O's link + astroturfing
One reason John Oliver posted his direct link is that the FCC had made it really hard to get to the comments section manually - took a lot of clicks. Obviously they didn't want real comments, and/or couldn't handle a flood - but got them anyway. As in, someone with a laptop and a slow connection could probably have dos'd them by themselves.
Then the cable companies, with the usual for-profit motives, piled on with what we know in some cases to be utterly fake comments - multiple ones from dead folks or live ones with the precisely same text, adding to the "denial of service".
The FCC says they intend to keep those known-false "votes" anyway. Which is by itself interesting.
If in fact they were DOS'd - how can they definitively say that it was people not trying to leave comments? Show us the logs! Could people have been hitting refresh in response to slow load times, or is that too just completely made up?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
