Thanks in large part to John Oliver's recent piece on net neutrality, the FCC's comment system has seen a massive spike in user comments on the subject. As of this writing, more than 555,972 comments have been filed with the FCC regarding the agency's plan to kill popular net neutrality protections for consumers, which still pales in comparison to the record 4 million public comments filed when the FCC crafted the rules back in 2015.
But over at Reddit a number of users this week
began to notice a group of 128,000 (and counting) duplicate comments -- filed in
perfect alphabetic order -- all opposing net neutrality. All of the comments made the same (misleading) statement:
quote:
"The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation," the comment says. "I 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."
It should go without saying by now that
blindly gutting consumer protections and letting Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Charter blithely abuse the lack of last-mile competition doesn't magically create jobs or aid the economy. And, as we've
explained at length, FCC boss Ajit Pai's plan to shovel any remaining oversight to the already over-extended FTC (authority which AT&T has shown can be easily
tap danced around) could prove disastrous for broadband consumers.
The fact that there are duplicate comments in and of itself isn't alarming, given that net neutrality activists and ISP think tanks both use outrage-o-matic e-mail campaigns -- which let users file the digital equivalent of a form letter with the FCC. But ZDNet dug a little deeper into the comments and discovered they were being created by a bot that's pulling names alphabetically from a database (possibly public voter registration records or a previous data breach).
But the really interesting part: ZDNet managed to get a hold of the supposed owners of these names, many of which say they never filed comments -- and have no idea what net neutrality even is:
quote:
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.
It's still not clear who is spearheading the bot campaign, but crafting entirely phony opposition to net neutrality has been a tactic used by large ISPs in the past. In 2014 a lobbying group by the name of DCI Group (which takes
funding from Verizon) was caught paying people to
voice opposition to net neutrality online. You just
know your argument is sound when you have to pay fake people (or bots) to parrot it.