All the Ways the FCC’s Process for Killing Net Neutrality Has Been Really Shady

The docket where the Federal Communications Commission has solicited public input has been saturated with fraudulent comments in favor of repeal—from bots, Russian email addresses, stolen identities, and even dead people. There was also a cyberattack on the comment system, an incident currently under investigation by the Office of Government Affairs. Someone, or maybe several someones, really wants net neutrality gone, and has gone to great and shady lengths to push along its demise. The net neutrality repeal process has been so fraught, however, that it’s been hard to keep up with the running list of snafus and trickery. So here it is:

• In May, the names people who recently died were found to have commented posthumously in favor of the FCC’s plan to repeal the network neutrality rules.
• 444,938 of the comments came from Russian email addresses, and 1.74 million comments in total came from outside the U.S. Only 25 of those emails from outside the U.S. were in favor of keeping the net neutrality rules.
• Thousands of comments from stolen identities have plagued the FCC’s system, which New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office helped uncover with an investigation and an online tool with which people can check to see if a comment was submitted under their name.
• Many people’s names appeared thousands of times in the FCC’s net neutrality docket, and 94 percent of the comments appeared to be duplicates and were submitted multiple times.
• In May, the FCC said its comment system went down due to “deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic,” an attack often referred to as a DDoS attack, which the Government Accountability Office is now investigating. According to a letter from two members of Congress who called for the investigation, the FCC hasn’t “released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred.”