Congress is set to grill Chairman Pai for falsely claiming his agency was hit with a cyberattack — here's how it could affect the war over net neutrality

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is set to testify Aug 16 in front of a Senate oversight committee. He's certain to have to respond to questions while there about false statements he and some of his subordinates made to lawmakers about an incident in 2017 in which the agency's computer systems got overwhelmed during the comment period for its then-ongoing net-neutrality proceeding. Chairman Pai has tried to distance himself from those false statements, blaming them on the agency's former chief information officer, David Bray. But lawmakers are sure to want to know when Pai knew the statements were false and why he didn't retract them earlier. Perhaps more importantly, lawmakers may well try to delve into the role the incident played in Chairman Pai's effort to overturn the FCC's net-neutrality rules. And the incident and Pai's answers about it could factor into ongoing court battle over his repeal of those rules.

Free Press, Public Knowledge, and other groups have sued the FCC to try to overturn the new rules, which the agency passed in December and which basically remove all net-neutrality protections. When considering new rules, the FCC is required by law to take public comments into account. As part of the case the groups are making against the rules, they plan to argue that the agency didn't, in fact, make a good-faith effort to do that. Instead, they plan to argue that it failed in its duty to seriously gather and consider the public's comments. The groups will point at numerous examples of this, but one of the examples will be the agency's inability to handle the comments coming in from "Last Week Tonight" viewers and falsely ascribing that inability to a DDoS attack. "If that were only thing, it wouldn't be fatal on its own," said Public Knowledg'e Harold Feld. "But it's part of a general pattern of the FCC failing to conduct the process in an above-board way that adequately gave the public a genuine opportunity to be heard."