Did Verizon overreact by blocking 4Chan? Depends on whom you ask

Did Verizon Wireless overreact in blocking 4Chan.org? Depends on whom you ask.

Verizon says it didn't block the popular online bulletin board, but "eliminated connectivity" to portions of 4Chan that appeared to be flooding the network with traffic from a denial of service attack. The nation's largest wireless service provider said it would restore service to the site by the end of Monday. "The most important thing we offer? Our network," Verizon spokesman James Gerace wrote in a blog. "When our network is attacked, or at risk of attack in a way that could harm our customers' ability to make and receive calls, or use wireless multimedia and data services, we jump to action." 4Chan, in an email to Post Tech late Monday, disagreed. "4Chan did *not* conduct any kind of 'malicious attack' against Verizon's network and was mostly certainly 'blocked'," wrote founder Christopher Poole. He said the company wasn't warned ahead of time that Verizon would block its sites and compared Verizon's actions to an episode with AT&T last year. So what happened over the weekend? According to 4Chan, a denial-of-service attack was launched on the company's servers, spoofing the originating IP addresses so that it appeared to be coming from the Web site. But Poole said the attack was limited. The public Interest group Free Press said that despite the origins of the problem, carriers such as Verizon need to inform online users and Web sites of such actions. And, it said, the episode underscored the need for clearer guidelines for how Internet service providers control traffic over their networks.