State attorneys general are now threatening lawsuits against the federal government’s repeal of “net neutrality” rules.
New York’s attorney general says he’ll lead a multistate lawsuit to stop the Federal Communications Commission’s rollback of rules that guaranteed equal access to the internet. Democrat Eric Schneiderman has been investigating fake public comments submitted to the FCC during the net neutrality comment process.
Schneiderman says his analysis shows 2 million comments stole the identities of real Americans, including dead people and children.
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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, said at a July FCC meeting that the raw number of comments wasn’t as important as the substance of issues raised
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson says he plans to file yet another lawsuit against the Trump administration: this one over net neutrality.
In a news release, Ferguson said that within days he will challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s vote Thursday to repeal Obama-era rules that guaranteed equal access to the internet. He says the agency failed to follow the Administrative Procedures Act.
Ferguson has also sued over President Donald Trump’s travel ban, religious exemptions for contraceptive coverage, and the decision to end deportation protections for those brought to the U.S. illegally as children, among other topics.
The attorney general says the FCC’s action allows internet service providers to discriminate based on content and undermines a free and open internet.
Critics are questioning how the Federal Communications Commission considered its repeal of net-neutrality rules, asking if it abided by its legal obligation to review and consider the public’s comments.
The Obama-era rules aimed to guarantee equal access to the internet, curbing the power of internet providers to control where people go and what they do online.
Sean Moulton, open government program manager for the Washington-based nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, says public comments ensure that the public can “have its voice heard and considered.”
A Pew Research Center analysis of the nearly 22 million public comments on net neutrality submitted to the FCC found that the vast majority were repeats, with more than 75,000 comments submitted at the exact same second on nine different occasions — possibly indicating these were automated submissions, such as in organized bot campaigns.
The FCC received five times the number of comments it did under the Obama administration and shaved a month off its review time, completing it in four months, Moulton says.
Information from various news sources
