NLPC Claims 'Massive Gaming' of Title II Comments; IA Highlights ISP Investments

Email domains in Russia, France and Germany generated 237,000 pro-net neutrality comments filed with the FCC in a seven-day span in May, the National Legal and Policy Center said in a news release Wednesday. NLPC said its forensic analysis found that thousands of the comments were the same comment submitted repeatedly from the same foreign filer, using the same international email domain and same international address. It said thousands more were from foreign domain extensions but used nonexistent U.S. addresses. It said many of the comments filed by foreign filers used international or U.S. addresses seemingly generated by www.fakeaddressgenerator.com, since the fake addresses roughly match addresses used in filed international comments. NLPC last week said it found more than 465,000 pro-net neutrality public comments submitted with email addresses that didn't match up with the signers' names or the same email addresses were used to file multiple comments (see 1705310019). NLPC President Peter Flaherty said, "The gaming of the FCC’s comment system appears to be massive and now encompassing overseas bot campaigns utilizing fake foreign physical and email addresses to submit comments. But gaming the system to generate hundreds of thousands of comments from people that aren’t even U.S. citizens and may not even exist is unprecedented." NLPC said it plans to submit the data to a professional data forensics expert for a deeper comments analysis. The FCC didn't comment. Separately Wednesday, the Internet Foundation released a video of recent comments by ISPs on their network and broadband investments, with IA saying those levels of investment run contrary to the companies' claims the existing net neutrality rules stifle innovation and investment. IA CEO Michael Beckerman in a statement said, "Broadband investment enables a virtuous circle of innovation for the whole internet ecosystem. Strong, enforceable net neutrality rules allow this virtuous circle of growth to continue." And the Application Developers Alliance emailed us that at its meeting with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (see 1706050055), it said it believes Congress needs to act on establishing net neutrality rules.