Chairman Pai to Senators: Little Recourse for Fake Net Neutrality Comments

In a letter to Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rob Portman (R-OH), Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that there is little the FCC can do to prevent public comments filed under false names, or under stolen identities or to prevent mass bogus filings in what is meant to be an open, public, process.

The network neutrality comment docket was flooded with comments from Russia and bot-driven input, and the FCC also said it was the subject of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks that impeded the filing of comments. In his letter, Chairman Pai explained that in order to allow for the filing of bulk comments, the FCC in 2016 was reconfigured to allow automated submissions, and that while it uses commercially available tools to protect the system from cyber attacks, "[The Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS)] is fundamentally an open, public-facing system, which limits our ability to shut down inappropriate bots accessing [it]." Following disruptions to the systems May 7-8, 2017, the FCC did "implement solutions" limiting the "amount" of disruptive bot-related activity, Chairman Pai told Sen Portman.  As to the suggestions that many of the comments were from outside the United States, Chairman Pai said that the FCC does not have policies or procedures for determining the nationalities of commenters or whether the address of the comment is outside the US, save for a box to check that is optional.