About a year ago the Internet was up in arms regarding FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s decision to repeal the Net Neutrality rules. It was one of the most hotly contested issues of the year. Recent revelations have shed light on some of what went on behind the curtains and some of that involved interference from Russia. Could this revelation restore net neutrality?
Russian Meddling
Russia meddles in our affairs and that should be no surprise to anyone. We also meddle in their affairs and that should also be no surprise to anyone. It should also be no surprise that Russian agents would stick their nose into an issue like the repeal of Net Neutrality. And they did, even Pai admits so. It is doubtful that they were truly interested in the fate of Net Neutrality but instead were more interested in sowing division.
During the public statement period upwards of 500,000 comments were submitted by users with Russian email addresses. Pai claims that most of these were in favor of maintaining Net Neutrality but this deluge of fake comments prompted criticism by some that this removed any legitimacy of the process. It is also believed that as many as 9,500,000 comments were submitted by people who had their identities stolen and had their email address used falsely or email addresses from fake email accounts. Much of the above was originally explained away saying that the commenting system was hacked though this has been proved to be a lie.
New York Times Lawsuit
Much of this has come to light thanks to a lawsuit submitted by the New York Times. They requested the server logs of the more than 23 million comments submitted. With 99.7% of these comments in favor of keeping Net Neutrality as determined by a study by Stanford University once supposed spambots were filtered out, it makes many wonder if the government was truly interested in doing the will of the people. The FCC refused to turn the over stating that the information needs to be kept private to prevent cyber attacks.
Could there be a change?
Any comment made by a Russian email address is not illegal though those could have been filtered out easily. It would be hard for anyone to know that a comment made by someone with their identity stolen was phony so it is hard to blame the government or Pai for that, though the act itself is illegal under both federal and state laws. Finding the culprit could be difficult to impossible. For people who used a fake email address to submit a comment that could be hard to track but many said the same thing so those too could be easily removed.
With almost half of all comments received being phony it has prompted many, including the Democrats on the FCC board to call for change. Will it work? Probably not. It will be used as a tool against any Republican in their reelection efforts, focusing on President Trump. This certainly will be an issue that voters will be unlikely to forget, especially if ISPs abuse the system.
While the country waits for the results of the Mueller Investigation we seem to have something else to thank Russia for. It seems that Russia can insert itself into any issue at will and we need to be prepared for that. It seems that with the repeal of Net Neutrality we were unprepared and that needs to change. It was Net Neutrality last year, who knows what it could be this year. After all, we are doing the same to other nations around the world.