In their typical juvenile fashion, the 4chan boards launched an attack against Verizon Wireless customers over the weekend and 4chan’s owners are playing victim with no mention of their own responsibility.  The 4chan board servers were sending a flood of messages to Verizon Wireless customers which could effectively degrade or even block their Internet connectivity.  Rather than acknowledge their own faults, 4chan’s only response was to complain that their boards are being blocked “intentionally” by Verizon and that their users should call Verizon support lines.

Some in the blogosphere are complaining about Verizon censorship and it seems that they have learned nothing from last Summer when 4chan’s servers attacked AT&T’s network.  AT&T was forced to protect its customers by blocking the 4chan IP addresses that were attacking them.  Many in the blogosphere and even mainstream online tech media cried foul before and even after it became clear that AT&T was defending against a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

The initial cries of “censorship” became “how can we trust private network operators to act as Internet cops”.  But this is ludicrous since there is no one else who can defend against DoS attacks except for the ISPs, and ISPs typically block tens of thousands of DoS attacks everyday.  The consumer or business can’t defend against DoS attacks themselves because by the time they block the traffic on their own equipment, the damage to their Internet connection is already done by sheer flooding.  Some would suggest that ISPs shouldn’t be playing the role of law enforcement, but there are no government enforcement agencies operating inside the Internet.  More importantly, do we really want the government to have that kind of power?

There hasn’t been a single example of ISPs censoring or blocking competitors under the guise of blocking DoS attacks.  If it ever became a problem, regulators like the FCC have oversight over ISPs and the FCC has demonstrated a willingness to intervene on behalf of anyone bringing a complaint.  In this most recent 4chan fiasco, Verizon is absolutely right to protect its own network and 4chan needs to step up and clean their own house if they don’t want ISPs blocking them in the future.  The blogosphere needs to wise up about 4chan because they have cried wolf enough times.