FCC Chair Says 'Russian Email Addresses' Submitted Public Net Neutrality Comments

Though the Federal Communications Commission on Monday denied reporters’ requests for records relating to millions of public comments submitted last year about net neutrality, Chairman Ajit Pai made a surprising claim in justifying his decision: The Russians did it.

The FCC’s net neutrality decision-making process has been subject to scrutiny for months. Pai falsely claimed last year that the FCC’s public comment system had been the victim of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In reality, according to an inspector general’s report, there were no such attacks, just a massive wave of comments, many due to a segment calling for public comments by HBO’s John Oliver.

Near the end of his statement justifying not releasing the comment data, Pai referred to a dissenting Democratic colleague on the commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, and noted “the fact that the half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses and the nearly eight million comments filed by e-mail addresses from e-mail domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com supported her position on the issue!”