FCC Rejects New York AG Efforts in Comment Quest

Federal Communications Commission General Counsel Thomas Johnson said the agency must “respectfully decline” requests from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as part of the AG’s investigation into the fraudulent use of names on comments in the net neutrality rollback proceeding. Johnson said revealing the logs of IP addresses for some comments raises “significant personal privacy concerns” and could also endanger the security of the commission’s comment system. He also pushed back on Schneiderman’s characterization of the comment proceeding as corrupted, noting that the FCC’s draft order doesn’t rely on non-substantive comments submitted under multiple different names. “The commission does not make policy decisions merely by tallying the comments on either side of a proposal to determine what position has greater support, nor does it attribute greater weight to comments based on the submitter’s identity,” Johnson wrote. “Accordingly, the commission has never burdened commenters with providing identity verification or expended the massive amount of resources necessary to verify commenters’ identities.”