Arts+Labs' co-chair Mark McKinnon weighed in last Friday at Internet Evolution on the 4Chan/AT&T debacle in which AT&T was mistakenly accused of censoring parts of the website 4Chan by, well, just about everyone:
Meanwhile, George Ou of Digital Society wrote that AT&T did precisely the right thing by blocking the parts of 4Chan that appeared to be the source of a DDoS attack on some AT&T customers:
Unfortunately, despite the baselessness of the accusations against AT&T, there hasn't been much eating of crow by those who were in the wrong. Looks like for some bloggers, the idea is shoot first, don't ask many questions later, and never apologize.
As reports surfaced Sunday evening that AT&T was blocking parts of 4chan, the immediate reaction from several quarters was that this was an attempt by the telecom giant to "censor" objectionable content on the Web, and that consequently AT&T should suffer mightily for its shameless violation of network neutrality.
Encapsulating those basic responses, LA Metblogs asked: "Why does AT&T think they can censor parts of the web, and how quickly will 4chan retaliate?" iReport ramped up the rhetoric, asking if the block signified "The End of Free Speech." TechCrunch upped the ante again, calling AT&T's act a declaration of war against 4chan; and SaveTheInternet linked approvingly to this breathless heap of hyperbolic nonsense at Fudzilla.
Rerutled, a diarist at Daily Kos immediately dismissed AT&T's description of the DoS problem as a ruse to shut down the hapless 4channers.
The idea that any disruption in service is a calculated decision by an ISP wanting to lock up information is a fairly typical knee-jerk response from some network neutrality supporters: Lob accusations first, gather facts later.
Meanwhile, George Ou of Digital Society wrote that AT&T did precisely the right thing by blocking the parts of 4Chan that appeared to be the source of a DDoS attack on some AT&T customers:
When a DoS attack occurs, the victim being attacked can block the attack traffic but not before the attack has already jammed up and killed their Internet connection. Only the network operator can block the attack far enough upstream that the network isn't flooded. This not only preserves the network for the direct victims of the DoS attack, it also keeps the network unclogged for everyone else.
It was clear early on from the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) message boards that many ISPs were blocking 4chan IP addresses due to the massive amounts of DoS attack traffic coming from 4chan. We're talking about enough traffic that could fill up gigabit Ethernet links which is the equivalent of hundreds of broadband connections. It turned that 4chan was being DoS attacked by others using spoofed (forged) addresses and 4chan in turn reflected the attack traffic onto other forced IP addresses of other victims many of whom were on AT&T's network.
Unfortunately, despite the baselessness of the accusations against AT&T, there hasn't been much eating of crow by those who were in the wrong. Looks like for some bloggers, the idea is shoot first, don't ask many questions later, and never apologize.
