Report Falsely Blames The EFF For Fraudulent Net Neutrality Comments

from the extremely-greasy-shenanigans dept

So we've discussed at length how somebody is gaming the FCC's comment system, using a bot to post hundreds of thousands of fake comments in support of the agency's plan to kill net neutrality. We've also made it pretty clear that the FCC doesn't appear interested in doing much about this, because these bogus (and in some instances dead) people "support" the FCC's plan to gut consumer protections governing the already uncompetitive broadband market.

I've had some first-hand experience with the FCC's apathy, given I've been trying to get them to remove (or even address) a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming I run an "unregistered PAC" and am upset that Title II "diminished broadband investment, stifled innovation, and left American consumers potentially on the hook for a new broadband tax" (none of which is true, it should go without saying). While the agency says it's looking into my complaint, you simply don't get the sense that tackling public proceeding comment fraud will be a top agency priority anytime soon.

Initial analysis of the FCC comments suggest it's largely the anti-net neutrality side that's been engaged in chicanery at any real scale. But in an obvious attempt to try and deflate that media narrative, there's a growing attempt to insist that massive, industrialized abuse of the FCC's net neutrality comment docket is something both sides are engaged in. For example, a report released last week (pdf) by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) policy and lobbying think tank proclaimed that "hundreds of thousands" of bogus pro net neutrality comments were filed with the FCC, most of them coming from the EFF.

A report over at the Daily Caller quickly parroted the report's findings:

"More than 100,000 comments supporting government regulation of the internet appear to have been automatically submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a left-leaning nonprofit, according to a forensic analysis published Wednesday.

The responses likely did not come organically from real people, which the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) forum for public comment on net neutrality is intended to be for, according to The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC). Rather, the NLPC claims the comments seem to be artificially submitted by the EFF since language used is highly similar to EFF’s submission platform and both the email addresses and the physical addresses of the listed people are fake, or don’t exist.

But in an amusing takedown over at the EFF website, the group calls the NLPC's analysis "false" and "flawed." The original NLPC report claims that the EFF used the agency's own Dear FCC form letter website to file around 100,000 comments using fake names and e-mail addresses. But the EFF dissected its own data from this period to highlight that this claim simply wasn't true:

"So how do we know NLPC’s report is wrong? For one thing, we counted the number of comments people have submitted to the FCC through our system. That number is nowhere near the 100,000 comments NLPC said we filed.

Further, just before the sunshine period—when the FCC stopped accepting comments—we started storing copies of comments submitted through our system, because we weren’t sure how the FCC would treat comments submitted during that period. This week, we searched through all of the stored comments for the names and email address domains listed in NLPC’s report, and didn’t find a single match."

Additional analysis of the data found that whoever did submit the 100,000 or so comments, didn't even use the EFF's own tool. An errant apostrophe (the FCC's system uses "right single quotation marks" while the submitted comments used a neutral "typewriter apostrophe") indicates the text was copied and pasted from the EFF site, but wasn't submitted from the EFF's tool itself:

"Why does the difference matter? Because it shows that whoever submitted the 100,000 identical comments the NLPC report mentions copied and pasted the text to make the comments look like they came through EFF’s DearFCC.org site, when they did not. If NLPC had looked closely at the comments they would have noticed the difference, and realized that the comments weren’t generated by EFF’s website. Apparently, they did not."

So according to the EFF's analysis, someone cut and pasted a part of the EFF's own form letter, then submitted it using fake names, e-mail addresses and physical addresses more than 100,000 times. Now it's entirely possible that somebody in favor of net neutrality thought they were "helping" by engaging in this behavior (though given the rules' popularity, it's not really necessary). But it's also entirely possible (having watched telecom lobbyists for the better part of two decades) that someone did this as an attempt to make net neutrality supporters look bad, and overshadow media reports of the bot being used to stuff the ballot box.

You'll note that the lobbying and policy think tank behind the report, the National Legal and Policy Center, opposes net neutrality -- and didn't make so much as a peep over the last few months as someone used a bot to fill the FCC comment system with bogus support for the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality. But in a blog post discussing their findings, the group is quick to lambaste the EFF for violating consumer privacy, despite what pretty clearly wound up being some deeply flawed analysis:

"For groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that claim to champion consumers’ online privacy, it would be an unprecedented privacy breach if they knowingly culled other people’s email addresses from spam databases and without their consent falsely submitted comments into the docket,” Flaherty continued. “At this point, the full extent of the problem is unclear, but it definitely deserves further investigation."

And when the EFF made it clear the comments didn't come from its system and the group had no part in filing them, the NPLC had a rather unique interpretation of the EFF's statement:

So again, there's two options here: someone supporting net neutrality took the time to try and pad the numbers by cutting and pasting the EFF's form letter into the comment system, using fake names and e-mail addresses. Or, someone opposing net neutrality used the EFF's form letter to try and frame the group for falsely stuffing the ballot box, further eroding trust in the validity of the FCC process. And given the lion's share of legitimate comments support keeping the rules intact, this latter possibility offers some obvious benefits to net neutrality opponents.

Hopefully we'll see some additional, independent and professional analysis of the data down the road. Either way, as with my own experiences above, this could all be prevented by the FCC actually giving a damn and policing abuse of its own comment system. As the EFF quite correctly notes, refusing to do so will only work to discredit the quality of the legitimate comments being made ahead of the final vote to kill the consumer protections later this year.

Filed Under: comments, fake comments, fcc, net neutrality, open internet
Companies: eff, nlpc

Comcast Pinky Swears That The Death Of Net Neutrality Won't Hurt In The Slightest

from the just-a-little-pin-prick dept

In the wake of the FCC's attempt to kill net neutrality, ISPs like Comcast have been working overtime trying to convince the press and public that nothing bad is actually happening. Shortly after the FCC voted to begin killing the rules, Comcast posted a trifecta of press statement, comment from company CEO Brian Roberts and commentary from top lobbyist David Cohen all saying the same thing: nothing bad is happening, and whatever happens -- Comcast really, truly adores transparency and will work tirelessly to defend the open internet:

The fact that this runs in stark, documentable opposition to reality and Comcast's behavior over the last twenty years isn't something you're supposed to dwell on. Cohen (the company gets mad at us for pointing out he's still a lobbyist despite using the title of "Chief Diversity Officer" to dodge lobbying accountability rules) has also been spending the last month or so trying to argue that we can still have net neutrality despite walking back the FCC's authority over broadband providers:

"While some try to conflate the two issues, Title II and net neutrality are not the same. Title II is a source of authority to impose enforceable net neutrality rules. Title II is not net neutrality. Getting rid of Title II does not mean that we are repealing net neutrality protections for American consumers."

That ignores history. You'll recall that the FCC's original 2010 rules were demolished by the Verizon lawsuit, with the courts saying that the FCC couldn't impose such rules without first classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II. So in 2015, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler did precisely that. Walking back that decision means stripping out the legal authority to actually enforce net neutrality, and Comcast certainly knows this. In fact we've repeatedly noted how the government's plan is to effectively gut privacy, net neutrality and other broadband consumer protections, and to replace them with the policy equivalent of wet tissue paper.

This message that nothing bad is actually happening and that Comcast really secretly loves net neutrality has been the cornerstone of an ongoing PR effort at the company the last few weeks. But given there's few if any people who trust what's arguably the least-liked company in America, responses to these claims on Twitter haven't been what you'd call warm:

One of the only pieces of evidence Comcast provides for its professed dedication to net neutrality is that it didn't, unlike Verizon, sue to overturn the FCC's 2010 rules. But as we noted back then, Comcast and AT&T didn't oppose the rules back then because they weren't really enforceable, but more importantly they simply didn't do very much. Having been written by Google and major ISPs, they carved out massive loopholes for all manner of anti-competitive behavior, and didn't even cover wireless networks.

But as the EFF writes in a missive taking aim at Comcast's new image reformation effort, the company also saw no point in suing then because it was bound to adhere to the (already flimsy) rules as a condition of its 2011 merger with NBC Universal:

"In its PR campaign, Comcast claims that its decision not to challenge the 2010 Open Internet Order is evidence of its support for network neutrality. In reality, it's likely the company stayed quiet because shortly after the Open Internet Order was approved Comcast was required to operate neutrally as a condition of its merger with NBC Universal. It had little to gain from publicly opposing the 2010 Order because they could not lift network neutrality obligations over their network even if they won in court due to merger conditions."

In short, Comcast didn't fight to overturn the 2010 rules because it loves net neutrality -- it did so because it knew the rules were garbage, and merger conditions wound up binding the company to them anyway (for whatever good that would have actually done). It's only once the rules had actual teeth -- provided by Title II authority -- that Comcast began to get nervous that somebody might actually stop the company from being an anti-competitive jackass.

Comcast's positions are viciously contradicted by a decade of indisputable anti-competitive decisions on this front, including the company's early decision to throttle all upstream BitTorrent traffic (and lie about it, repeatedly), its ham-fisted decision to use usage caps and overage fees to hamstring video competition, and it's decision to try and limit what devices consumers use to view the content of their choice on the platforms of their choosing.

By and large you'd be hard pressed to believe any major ISP -- especially Comcast -- has much if any credibility on this subject, and it's not really clear exactly who one of the least-liked companies in America thinks it's fooling.

Filed Under: competition, fcc, net neutrality, open internet, title ii
Companies: comcast