Stanford Law School

The House will vote on H.R. 1644 (Save the Internet Act of 2019), introduced by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), which would reinstate the net neutrality protections of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order. H.R. 1096 (Promoting Internet Freedom and Innovation Act of 2019), a competing measure introduced by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), purports to restore the Open Internet Order’s rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization, as well as the transparency rule.

In the leadup to the Federal Communications Commission's historic vote in Dec 2017 to repeal all network neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency. The FCC did nothing to try to prevent comment stuffing and comment fraud, and even after the vote, made no attempt to help the public, journalists, policymakers actually understand what Americans actually told the FCC about the repeal of the 2015 Open Internet Order. This report aims to help make that clear. This report used the 800,000 comments identified as semantic standouts from form letter and fraud campaigns.