FCC refuses to release text of more than 40,000 net neutrality complaints

The Federal Communications Commission has denied a request to extend the deadline for filing public comments on its plan to overturn net neutrality rules, and the FCC is refusing to release the text of more than 40,000 net neutrality complaints that it has received since June 2015.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in May for tens of thousands of net neutrality complaints that Internet users filed against their ISPs. The NHMC argues that the details of these complaints are crucial for analyzing FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to overturn net neutrality rules. The coalition also asked the FCC to extend the initial comment deadline until 60 days after the commission fully complies with the FoIA request. A deadline extension would have given people more time to file public comments on the plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. Instead, the FCC denied the motion for an extension and said that it will only provide the text for a fraction of the complaints, because providing them all would be too burdensome. Chairman Pai has previously claimed that his proposed repeal of net neutrality rules is using a "far more transparent" process than the one used to implement net neutrality rules in 2015. Chairman Pai has also claimed that net neutrality rules were a response to "hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom" and that there was no real problem to solve.