NY AG Probes Lobbyists Over Net Neutrality Fake Comment Scandal

NEW YORK CITY—In the run-up to last year’s FCC vote to repeal the federal net neutrality rules enacted in 2015, the commission asked for public comments on the issue, to be posted to the FCC web site. But an investigation by New York state’s attorney general found that nearly 10 million of those comments were fake, many submitted using identities stolen from unsuspecting Americans, with even two United States Senators finding that phony comments were submitted in their names. On Tuesday, New York AG Barbara Underwood intensified the state’s probe into the fake comments—which were almost half of the total 22 million comments submitted—slapping more than a dozen telecommunications lobbying and advocacy groups with subpoenas, in an effort to find out if the industry groups were behind the flood of phony comments, according to a report by The New York Times.  The fake comments served to make the public debate over net neutrality appear far more two-sided than it actually was. A new study, titled Filtering Out the Bots: What Americans Actually Told the FCC about Net Neutrality Repeal, by a researcher at Stanford University was able to identify about 800,000 authentic comments submitted to the FCC—and found that they opposed the repeal of net neutrality almost unanimously. A mere 0.3 percent—that is, three of every 1,000—of the genuine comments supported repeal of the net neutrality rules, the tech news site Gizmodo reported. The study also found that the pro-net neutrality comments came from all areas of the United States, covering regions that tended to lean Republican and those that supported Democrats. “When you sift through all the noise, fake comments, bots and BS, you always find the truth,” said Evan Greer, of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, reacting to the study. “No one wants their cable company to charge more fees and control what they see and do on the Internet.” Among the groups hit with subpoenas by Underwood, according to the Times, included Century Strategies, a firm headed by veteran right-wing activist and former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed, as well as the conservative political “messaging” group MediaBridge, which boasts on its own web site that in 2014 it “submitted nearly 800,000 comments to the Federal Communications Commission opposing the regulation of the Internet.” Photo by Slowking4/Wikimedia Commons