FCC Chair Says 'Russian Email Addresses' Submitted Public Net Neutrality Comments [View all]

[pecosbob]

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.

Oh, yeah? That's not what you said last year...

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!”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fcc-chair-says-russian-email-addresses-submitted-public-net-neutrality-comments