FCC pushes ahead on plan to vote on net neutrality

Despite millions of comments — many of them faked — a lawsuit and calls from the New York state attorney general, more than two dozen senators and more than 50 mayors for a delay or reversal, the Federal Communications Commission seems fixed on Thursday for its vote on repealing net neutrality rules, expected to pass.

The issue generated almost 23 million public comments, shattering previous records for comments on a government policy issue. A study by Pew Research called into question millions of comments, as researchers identified bots that could be used to generate fake comments. Bloomberg reported Russian sources for hundreds of thousands of comments.

Millions of comments included the same messages — probably form letters from organizations on both sides, although of the top seven most-repeated messages, six included anti-net neutrality sentiment. The failure of an FCC scheme to verify email addresses caused the researchers to despair of using comments to determine the majority’s view on the issue of whether internet service providers can discriminate on the treatment of content online by controlling bandwidth speeds.

“As public opinion researchers, we found it a little bit hard to really make sense of the public’s opinion on this issue,” says Aaron Smith, one of the authors of the study.

Rep. Sean Maloney, a Democrat who represents the Hudson Valley

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images About 60 demonstrators gathered outside of the 31st annual Chairman’s Dinner to show their support for net neutrality at the Washington Hilton earlier this month.