The Federal Communications Commission is taking comments through midnight tonight leading up to their initial vote May 18 on Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to gut net neutrality, a comment period that has been fraught with technical problems. The FCC's website and comment system, apparently residing on servers held together with duct tape, have not proved to be up to the challenge of handling the comments of everyone who wants to keep net neutrality. Also a problem, the swarm of anti-net neutrality bot comments that emerged a few days ago. Gizmodo has discovered the origin point of the bot comments, but not the perpetrator, or from where the perpetrator is getting the names and address of real people it's using.
Both the Verge and ZDNet managed to reach a few of the supposed commenters, and found that they had no knowledge of their alleged comments. After we attempted to contact over one hundred individuals associated with the comments, we received three replies. All three said they did not file any comment with the FCC—a woman in Tuscaloosa named Ariehl Kimbrough, had never heard of the FCC or net neutrality. When we explained that her name and address had been used to file this comment, her response was simply a long, drawn-out, “Wow.” Another person, April Williams, when asked for more information via email, told us: “I am upset about this, sorry, but I’m not answering any further questions. More than enough of my information is in the hands of strangers.”
The text of the tens of thousands of identical comments that have been sent comes from the Center for Individual Freedom, a right-wing interest group that has consistently been rabidly anti-net neutrality. But they've told Gizmodo, in no uncertain terms, that they have nothing to do with the bot that's using their language to flood the FCC. They do have a tool set up on their website for people to submit their own comments, but say "absolutely no, CFIF is not filing comments under the names of individuals without their knowledge."
Maybe the Internet & Television Association, the lobby group for internet service providers and major funder of CIF, has something to do with it then. This has to be a bot, as Gizmodo explains, because "in many cases multiple comments were filed each second, and the gap between them was relentless: Even at 2am yesterday, the comments were coming in seconds apart."
It's going to be hard to match a bot in getting in our comments, but we have to. With the fact that we can demonstrate that tens of thousands of anti-net neutrality comments are gong to be fake, it makes overwhelming those opponents with our own comments that much more important.
Urgent! Sign the petition to protect net neutrality. Trump's new FCC chair is trying hard to allow a corporate takeover of the Internet ASAP. Time to speak up!