Inside the collapse of the FCC’s digital infrastructure -- and the rush to save it

The flood of public interest in the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet proceeding revealed just how dated the FCC's online public engagement infrastructure has become.

As the system strained under the attention, grass-roots activists and staffers inside the FCC worked together, hour-by-hour, to keep it up and running. At times they got on each other’s nerves; at others they pulled together. But all were coping with the same decades-old technology that, no one can now deny, simply isn’t up to the age of digital civic engagement. The FCC online commenting system's sputtering was an embarrassment to an agency eager to prove it is competent enough to make rules around modern technology and a frustration for groups with names like Fight for the Future and Demand Progress that are eager to prove both their organizing chops and the rightness of their issue.