FCC Plans 'Rebuild' of 'Behind the Times' ECFS, Pai Tells Senators

The FCC is “planning to rebuild and re-engineer” its electronic commenting filing system and has asked the House and Senate Appropriations committees for “the funds necessary,” Chairman Ajit Pai wrote Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. “We hope they will enable us to make important improvements by approving it soon.” The revamp would come more than a year after the ECFS application programming interface experienced problems during an FCC proceeding on rescinding its 2015 net neutrality rules. The FCC faced pushback over its claim the glitch stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service attack (see 1710130052 and 1806050046). “In addition to being technologically behind the times, the system that this Commission inherited from the prior Administration was designed to make it as easy as possible to file comments,” Pai told Merkley and Toomey. “While facilitating widespread public participation in the rulemaking process is a worthy and important goal, we believe that we can accomplish that goal while at the same time updating our system to minimize the potential for abusive behavior.” Pai said he will make several proposals that reflect the lawmakers' suggestions, including pitching CAPTCHA authentication or similar verification. “We will seek to redesign ECFS to institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct,” Pai said. The senators' offices didn't comment Wednesday. The FCC doesn't “have any information regarding whether any 'fake' comments were submitted by foreign governments, nor can we verify the total number of comments that may have originated from bots,” Pai told the senators: More than 7.5 million comments that favored 2015 rules had the same exact sentence and were “associated with only 50,508 unique names and street addresses.” More than 447,000 comments favoring 2015 rules claimed to come from people residing at the same address in Chelyabinsk, Russia, Pai said. Docket 17-108 had 2 million comments that used stolen identities, half a million from Russian email addresses and almost 8 million nearly identical comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com (see 1805090076).