As if manhandling reporters wasn't enough of an attack on democracy, Ajit Pai's FCC has taken recent moves to shut down transparency as it moves to end the open internet. First, Pai is refusing to disclose the supposed evidence he has that the FCC's comment system was shut down by a denial of service attack, a claim the agency made after John Oliver directed his viewers and social media followers to make their comments in support of net neutrality. The FCC immediately claimed that it wasn't overwhelming public support for the open internet that swamped their servers, but hackers. The whole internet—and two U.S. senators—demanded proof, but Pai won't cough it up.
In a ZDNet interview, FCC chief information officer David Bray said that the agency would not release the logs, in part because the logs contain private information, such as IP addresses. In unprinted remarks, he said that the logs amounted to about 1 gigabyte per hour during the alleged attack.
From the interview, Bray said that FCC staff noticed a high volume of incoming comments in the early morning of May 8, hours after the John Oliver show aired. The log files showed that non-human bots submitted a flood of comments using the FCC's API. The bot that submitted these comments sparked the massive uptick in internet traffic on the FCC by using the public API as a vehicle.
The public—particularly the hundreds of thousands of real people who left real comments—deserve to know what really happened here, but the FCC refuses to tell us, or to answer concerns that their system is capable of taking comments and letting the public speak. At the same time, the FCC is going to honor half a million identical anti-net neutrality comments made by bots.
The FCC didn’t respond to repeated requests to specifically say whether it would filter out the astroturfed comments. Speaking to reporters after announcing a step toward rolling back existing net neutrality protections, FCC Chair Ajit Pai admitted “a tension between having an open process where it’s easy to comment and preventing questionable comments from being filed.”
"Generally speaking, this agency has erred on the side of openness," he said.
Pai said the agency wouldn't consider comments with obviously fake names, like Wonder Woman and Joseph Stalin, but declined to go further. Reached for comment after Pai's statement, an FCC official declined to comment specifically on astroturfed comments.
"You heard his answer on erring on the side of inclusion," the official said.
A ZDNet investigation showed that many of the real names behind those comments came from people who swear they didn't make them, in some cases people who don't even know what net neutrality means. Someone, somehow got their names and addresses and a bot used them to file the same anti-net neutrality comments tens of thousands of times. And Pai is going to count them, because otherwise he would be able to show no public support for his effort to end the open internet.
We'll keep fighting. Sign the petition to send the FCC and our elected officials in D.C. a clear message that we won’t stand by and let them kill net neutrality.
