Verizon Wireless, Meet 4Chan [Broadband Reports]
Net neutrality advocates are raising questions about Verizon's decision to block portions of the 4chan image board network from its wireless customers. 4chan's reputation as a gathering place for malcontents that use the message board to organize activities ranging from Internet pranks to denial of service attacks appears to have caught up with it. Based on a statement from Verizon, their network security team "detected attacks" originating from an IP address associated with 4chan and took steps to block that address.
For its part, 4chan posted a message on its status blog indicating that Verizon had blocked the entire site. Verizon claims that the block was only applied to the IP address in question and was removed after it was no longer deemed a threat.
With the FCC in the process of considering adoption of regulations that would dictate how Internet providers manage their network, it's important that they take incidents like this into account, providing network operators the freedom to protect their users from organized, malicious attacks that would affect their ability to reliably use network resources.
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