New York Times denounces FCC for net neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is prosecuted by the New York Times for access to records surrounding public comment submitted to the agency before its controversial vote to repeal the protections of network neutrality last year.

the Time alleges in his complaint, filed Thursday in the Southern District Court of the United States, that the records "will shed light on the extent to which Russian nationals and agents of the Russian government hindered the notification of the agency process on a topic of general interest: the government's decision to abandon net neutrality.

According to the complaint, the FCC "has set up a series of roadblocks" Time attempted to obtain the recordings, including the Web server logs, through the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act).

The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Dot.

The agency's public comment system has been scrutinized by lawmakers and activists following its decision to cancel the network neutrality rules.

Before the vote, the comment system was flooded with comments both for and against the agency's proposal to cancel the Open Internet Order 2015 and replace it with the Restoring Internet Freedom command.

In May 2017, the FCC announced that it had been the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack shortly after Last week tonight The host John Oliver asked his viewers to leave comments in favor of net neutrality. However, last month, FCC President Ajit Pai admitted that the agency had never been hit by a DDoS attack and accused an employee of providing "inaccurate information."

Legislators have also called on the FCC to investigate millions of fraudulent comments left on its website before the vote on net neutrality. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) And Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) Sent a letter to the agency in May claiming that their identity had been fraudulently used to make comments before the vote.

Names of deceased persons have also been reported.

In the complaint, the Time alleges that there were even more problems. According to the complaint, a large part of the comments were "submitted by automation" and "some of these automated messages came from Russia".

In another case, a US District Court judge in the District of Columbia ordered the FCC to send him some data regarding the false comments submitted prior to the Net Neutral vote.

TechDirt reports that the FCC will need to provide email addresses used to submit CSV files and comments in bulk. However, as the information points out, the FCC is not required to deliver the Web server logs, as does the Time he's looking for.

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See the complaint here: