FCC’s Broken Comments System Could Help Doom Network Neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission’s public commenting process on network neutrality was such a debacle that the legitimacy of the entire body of comments is now in question. Many of the comments were filed with obviously bogus names.

Among the more visible cases of name theft: journalist and net neutrality advocate Karl Bode's identity was used without his consent for a comment favoring a roll back of the rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's name was used on hundreds of comments opposing his proposal, some threatening him with death or using racial slurs. John Oliver's name was used on more than 2,000 of comments as well. On a case by case basis, these forgeries are easy enough to spot. But in aggregate, they're making it harder to draw conclusions about the overall public sentiment of the proceeding. In May 2017, the FCC's site was also hit with what appeared to be a spambot submitting hundreds of thousands of anti-Title II comments with the exact same boilerplate language. The broadband industry is now using the chaos of the comments process to claim that the public actually supports repealing Title II.

Former FCC special counsel Gigi Sohn said, "I can’t imagine there is nothing they can do, and I’d love to see a citation to anything that says that they cannot remove a comment that has been proven to be fake." If anything, she says, the agency might have an obligation under the Administrative Procedure Act to remove fake comments from its consideration. "At a bare minimum, they should investigate these comments and if they can’t actually remove the comments, they can and should disregard them as part of their consideration of record."