The FCC this week has received hundreds of thousands of new comments on its proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules, and more than 128,000 of them are identical comments calling for the reversal of the Obama administration's "power grab." It seems likely that the influx of anti-net neutrality identical comments is coming from a bot, but the FCC hasn't addressed the matter publicly yet.
Searching the FCC's net neutrality comment proceeding for the text of the spam comment today turned up 128,323 results:
The FCC's comment system has been struggling intermittently today, so you might have trouble loading the search string or filing comments of your own.
While the identical anti-net neutrality comments have names and addresses attached to them, ZDNet found that the people listed as making the comments have no knowledge of doing so. In an article titled, "A bot is flooding the FCC's website with fake anti-net neutrality comments," ZDNet wrote:
The comments follow the same pattern: the bot appears to cycle through names in an alphabetical order, leaving the person's name, and postal address and zip code.
We reached out to two-dozen people by phone, and we left voicemails when nobody picked up. A couple of people late Tuesday called back and confirmed that they had not left any messages on the FCC's website. One of the returning callers specifically said they didn't know what net neutrality was. A third person reached in a Facebook message Tuesday also confirmed that they had not left any comments on any website.
The identical comments say that "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation." The comments go on to "urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the Internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the Internet to flourish for more than 20 years. The plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open Internet for everyone."
The John Oliver effect
Net neutrality comments have exploded since Sunday night when comedian John Oliver urged HBO viewers to protest the plan to eliminate net neutrality rules that forbid ISPs from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing Internet content in exchange for payment. There are about 730,000 comments now, of which about 700,000 are new since Oliver's show, despite the comment system suffering bouts of downtime and slowness.
Identical comments are nothing new from either the pro- or anti-net neutrality side. For example, we found nearly 18,000 comments that say, "The FCC Open Internet Rules (net neutrality rules) are extremely important to me. I urge you to protect them. I don't want ISPs to have the power to block websites, slow them down, make some more accessible than others, or split the Internet into 'fast lanes' for companies that pay and 'slow lanes' for the rest."
But these pro-net neutrality comments appear to come from a campaign urging people to submit pre-written comments, rather than from a bot. We can't find any similar campaign matching the text of the "unprecedented regulatory power' comments; that fact, combined with the evidence presented by ZDNet, suggests these anti-net neutrality comments aren't coming from the people whose names are attached to them.
(UPDATE: The anti-net neutrality comment text comes from a campaign by a group called the Center For Individual Freedom [CFIF], but the group says it "is not filing comments under the names of individuals without their knowledge," Gizmodo reported. When contacted by Ars, CFIF described its program as an "opt-in letter campaign" similar to those being run by net neutrality advocates, but said it "is not using bots or any similar tools in any way, shape or form." The group also said it "will continue to be on the constant lookout for any outside abuse of our efforts.")
We asked the FCC if it's aware of any bots spamming the comments site and if it's doing anything to try to prevent such activity, but we haven't received a response yet.
Since Oliver's show, there have been many well-intended comments while others are silly or offensive. The Washington Free Beacon pointed out that there have been nearly 2,000 comments filed under John Oliver's name, about 1,000 identical pro-net neutrality comments filed under the name "Yoni Schwartz," and hundreds submitted under the name of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. There were also racist comments about Pai and comments wishing for his death. Pai Chief of Staff Matthew Berry tweeted that he was "Very sad to see racist, hate-filled attacks against Chairman Pai being submitted to the FCC."
The FCC has attributed comment system downtime entirely to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that happened around the same time as John Oliver's show Sunday night. Yesterday, two Democratic senators asked Pai for more specific details on the attacks, the FCC's response to them, and the commission's ability to keep its comment site running smoothly during the net neutrality proceeding.
Although public opinion played a role in the FCC issuing strict net neutrality rules in 2015, the current FCC leadership says that the number of comments on either side doesn't matter as much as the quality of the arguments, the facts entered in the record, and legal arguments.
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