Flooded with thoughtful net neutrality comments, FCC highlights “mean tweets”

Facing extensive net neutrality support, FCC is ready to gut open Internet rules.

Widespread support for strong net neutrality rules continues, both from individuals who use the Internet and companies that offer websites and applications over the Internet. But Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has made a point of trumpeting anti-net neutrality sentiment as the FCC begins the process of reclassifying Internet service providers and eliminating net neutrality rules.

Net neutrality supporters have flooded the FCC with comments opposing Pai's plan to overturn the current net neutrality rules, particularly since comedian John Oliver tackled the topic on HBO a week ago. But for Pai, only one comment was important enough to warrant special mention.

On Friday, Pai issued a statement hailing the "exceptionally important contribution to the debate" made by a group of 19 nonprofit municipal-broadband providers. They wrote a letter saying that the net neutrality rules have forced them to "often delay or hold off from rolling out a new feature or service because we cannot afford to deal with a potential complaint and enforcement action."

The letter from the ISPs did not name a single feature or service that has not been introduced because of the net neutrality rules. But Pai said the municipal operators' status as "ISPs lacking any profit motive" makes their letter a "powerful endorsement of reversing the FCC's 2015 Title II Order," which classified ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

The Title II net neutrality order prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic or from prioritizing certain Internet services in exchange for payment. There were also new transparency rules that require ISPs to make greater public disclosures about hidden fees and data caps. But Pai's FCC exempted small ISPs, such as the 19 municipal operators, from those transparency rules. The municipal ISPs object to the net neutrality order's "general conduct standard" that's designed to prevent anti-consumer or anti-competitive activity besides blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The ISPs say that standard is too "broad and vague."

On Thursday this week, the FCC will take a preliminary vote on Pai's proposal to overturn the net neutrality order. After three more months of public comment, the FCC could make the decision final.

Pai hasn't publicly ruled out imposing some version of net neutrality rules, but his proposal suggests that consumers might benefit from ISPs having the ability to slow down websites and other online services.

Web companies support net neutrality

Pai has not issued any statements highlighting contributions from Internet stakeholders who support the net neutrality rules. Pai received an open letter from more than 1,000 "startups, innovators, investors, and entrepreneurial support organizations" who said that net neutrality rules prevent ISPs from taking actions that "could impede traffic from our services in order to favor their own services or established competitors."

The FCC also received a pro-net neutrality comment from the Internet Association, a trade group whose members include Amazon, Dropbox, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify, Twitter, and about 30 other Web companies.

"The Internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition, and innovation online," the group said. "In other words, existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept intact."

We asked the FCC today if Pai has any comment on these pro-net neutrality arguments and will provide an update if we get one.

Mean tweets

While Pai hasn't highlighted any pro-net neutrality arguments from Internet companies or individuals who have submitted comments to the FCC, he did take the time to make a video in which he "reads mean tweets" directed at him. The FCC promoted this video on its official Twitter account today.

Pai Chief of Staff Matthew Berry tweeted today that it's "Pathetic that Title II activists have been reduced to trying to harass @AjitPaiFCC's family." Berry pointed to an article in the Washington Free Beacon that describes pro-net neutrality groups leaving leaflets on doors in Pai's neighborhood and holding a vigil on the sidewalk outside Pai's house. The article argued that the net neutrality protestors have "a history of participating in violent protests," but none of the violent incidents mentioned by the Free Beacon involved Pai or his family.

Berry also condemned racist comments about Pai that were submitted to the FCC, and pro-net neutrality group Free Press agreed that racism and threats have no place in policy debates. The Internet Association also condemned threats and hateful comments directed at Pai.

"I really enjoy the public debate about the future of the Internet," Pai said in the "mean tweets" video. But while Pai and his staff have brought attention to net neutrality supporters whose opinions can be easily dismissed, they haven't tried to highlight serious arguments from the pro-net neutrality side in the days before the FCC takes its vote.

Net neutrality commenters and bots

The FCC has received more than 1.5 million comments on Pai's plan to overturn the Title II net neutrality rules. Many of the anti-net neutrality comments apparently come from bots that are using names drawn from data breaches.

For much more detail on the automated comments, you can read the posts, "FCC Filings Overwhelmingly Support Net Neutrality Once Anti-Net Neutrality Spam is Removed" by data scientist Jeff Fossett and "An Analysis of the Anti-Title II bots" by developer Chris Sinchok.

About 440,000 identical anti-net neutrality comments begin, "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the Internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy, and obstructing job creation." A random sample of these suggests that 67.4 percent were attributed to names involved in data breaches, Sinchok wrote.

"These numbers seem pretty stark and would indicate to me that the bot programmers are working with breach data directly or with a data warehouse whose lists ended up in one of these breaches," he wrote.

In another anti-net neutrality campaign that generated 181,000 comments, 74.2 percent of the comments used names from data breaches, he wrote. On the other side, a pro-net neutrality campaign that generated 24,000 comments used names from data breaches in 33.5 percent of filings, Sinchok wrote.

In an analysis that excluded spam, Fossett reviewed a random sample of 200 comments and found that 96.5 percent supported net neutrality rules.

Fossett also found evidence of pro-net neutrality bot activity, though it seems to have generated only a fraction of the number of comments generated by apparent anti-net neutrality bots.

"Even if the spam comments were all legitimate, this analysis suggests that filings would still be in favor of net neutrality by roughly a 59-40 margin overall," he wrote.

Even the cable industry found widespread support for net neutrality rules when it surveyed registered voters.

The FCC comments system is temporarily not accepting new net neutrality comments, but will be re-opened after the Thursday vote. The comment system suffered extensive downtime in the days after John Oliver's call to action caused a major increase in comment volume, but the FCC has so far attributed the outages solely to distributed denial-of-service attacks. Senate Democrats and net neutrality activists have asked the FCC to provide a more extensive explanation of the comment system's troubles and plans to keep it running during the net neutrality debate.

The FCC has said it will accept public comments until August 16.

Pai in 2014 vs. today

The sentiment in favor of net neutrality from individuals and website operators is a repeat from 2014, when most of the 4 million public comments supported strong net neutrality rules. In that case, a Democratic-led commission decided to strengthen its initial proposal and reclassify ISPs while outlawing blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization in 2015.

The FCC isn't required to do what the majority of commenters support, of course. The FCC seeks input from the public to get analysis and factual information, but the commissioners ultimately make the final decisions.

But according to the FCC's lone Democrat, Mignon Clyburn, Pai is following a much different process than the one he advocated in 2014. Last week, Clyburn issued a fact sheet comparing Pai's statements from 2014 to his actions this year. In 2014, Pai said that Congress instead of the FCC should make the decision, rather than "five unelected individuals." But now, the FCC is moving ahead on eliminating net neutrality rules even though the commission has just three members, with two seats waiting to be filled, Clyburn pointed out.

In 2014, Pai also said the FCC should hold hearings with economists from both sides of the net neutrality debate, and it should seek input from computer scientists, technologists, and other technical experts about "how they see the Internet's infrastructure and consumers' online experience evolving." But now that Pai is chairman, he is moving ahead with plans to overturn the net neutrality decision without taking any of those steps, Clyburn said. (Pai's office pointed out that Clyburn did not support Pai's suggestions in 2014 and said that he intends to conduct a cost-benefit analysis during the current rulemaking proceeding, according to a Consumerist story.)

Pai in 2014 said the FCC should avoid making any decisions that embroil the FCC, industry, and Americans "in yet another years-long legal waiting game." But while the 2015 net neutrality order was upheld in court twice, the order is now "being undone without any care for legal risks or uncertainty," Clyburn said. Pai's office acknowledged recently that the FCC is highly likely to be sued after making changes to the net neutrality rules.

"We are not confronted with an immediate crisis that requires immediate action," Pai said in 2014. But now, Pai is "rushing ahead to repeal net neutrality and Title II without any immediate need to do so," Clyburn argued.