The New York Attorney General’s Office found roughly two million fake comments on net neutrality were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission using stolen identities during the public comment process.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released details of his office’s investigation into the fake comments and condemned the FCC’s general counsel for saying it will not cooperate with the investigation.
The FCC is set to vote Thursday on its controversial plan to repeal Obama-era net neutrality rules that prohibit a network owner from stopping, slowing, or interfering with the flow of web traffic and require Internet providers to treat all content provided by big or small companies equally for consumers.
The repeal is expected to pass with a party-line vote, spearheaded by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai.
According to Schneiderman, a Democrat, the two million comments misused identities of real Americans, including more than 100,000 comments per state from New York, Florida, Texas, and California. Roughly 5,000 people have already filed reports about their stolen identities.
“As we’ve told the FCC: moving forward with this vote would make a mockery of our public comment process and reward those who perpetrated this fraud to advance their own hidden agenda,” Schneiderman said. “The FCC must postpone this vote and work with us to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Going forward with Thursday’s vote “will irreparably damage the FCC”s integrity,” Schneiderman said in a letter to FCC general counsel Thomas Johnson Jr.
In his letter, Schneiderman also copied Pai, who last month called the plan to repeal net neutrality a way to prevent the federal government from “micromanaging the Internet.”
