Net Neutrality

By Daniel Oberhaus for Motherboad - Yet upon closer inspection, some 500,000 of these comments are anti-net neutrality copypasta and bear the telltale signature of a bot (such as perfectly identical formatting and names listed in alphabetical order). Moreover, dozens of people whose names are associated with these comments have come out of the woodwork to say that they never posted these comments and are in fact strongly in favor of net neutrality. On Thursday, 14 people who say their identity was inappropriately used to oppose net neutrality without their permission wrote a letter demanding that Pai and the FCC open an investigation into the alleged astroturfing campaign. "Whoever is behind this stole our names and addresses, publicly exposed our private information without our permission, and used our identities to file a political statement we did not sign onto," the letter reads. "While it may be convenient for you to ignore this, given that it was done in an attempt to support your position, it cannot be the case that the FCC moves forward on such a major public debate without properly investigating this known attack."

By Kevin Collier for Vocativ - The federal agency weighing whether to kill a basic internet freedom wants to hear from you first. But it probably thinks your real voice is worth the same as that of a faked comment pretending to come from a real person. Whenever the Federal Communications Commission weighs a serious decision — like now, when it’s weighing whether to overturn rules to protect net neutrality, which keep internet providers from selling internet “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” for certain sites — it invites the public to comment, and weighs its response in its decision. So far this year, it’s already received more than 2 million such comments on net neutrality, and will assuredly receive far more in the coming months. Public comments are, in theory, an important part in how the FCC makes a choice. “When I was at the FCC, problems with the electronic comment filing system were treated with the utmost urgency and transparency,” Gigi Sohn, the counselor to previous FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, told Vocativ. However, as a ZDNet investigation discovered, however, a number of the recent comments supporting the net neutrality rollback used the exact same screed, blaming former U.S. President Barack Obama for the net neutrality rules and falsely claiming they’ve stifled broadband internet investment.

By Eleanor Goldfield for Art Killing Apathy - “The commission voted along party lines Thursday to move forward with the proceeding to eliminate the regulations, which reclassified internet service providers as telecommunications companies and required them to treat all web traffic equally. Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal would undo the reclassification, which would eliminate the commission’s legal authority to prevent internet service providers from blocking or throttling web content or creating “fast lanes” that websites can buy into.” What a gift to big Telecoms! On top of that, the Intercept released an article today reporting that the talking points delivered to Republicans on how to support Pai’s plan comes STRAIGHT from “the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter, and other cable industry companies.” We are up against a considerable force of Telecom lies and trickery specifically aimed at turning the Internet into a toll road and restricting our access. Constituents on both sides of the aisle need to understand the depth of deception and the real importance of Net Neutrality for us all!