Civic Engagement

My fellow FCC Commissioners would benefit from hosting their own public forums and listening to the concerns raised by consumers and small businesses. Doing so would allow them to hear first-hand on what it means to access the internet without fear that their broadband provider will slow down or block their favorite online applications and services. My colleagues would benefit from hearing concerns about broadband providers’ poor service, surprise price hikes, and inadequate customer support, so, why won’t they?

Network neutrality regulations underpin the digital lives of many Americans, yet it is challenging to survey the public on such an inherently complex and technical subject. For this reason, Pew Research Center set out to analyze the opinions of those who had taken the time to submit their thoughts to the Federal Communications Commission.  Among the most notable findings:

It usually doesn’t take much to get people on the internet worked up. To get them really worked up, make the topic internet regulation. In the week since the Federal Communications Commission released a plan to scrap existing rules for internet delivery, more than 200,000 phone calls, organized through online campaigns, have been placed to Congress in protest. An additional 500,000 comments have been left on the agency’s website. On social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, the issue has been a leading topic of discussion.

The Federal Communications Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom order has reinvigorated the FCC network neutrality docket, with tens thousands of new comments warning against the planned Dec. 14 vote on the order posted in the last day alone.  The docket already had over 22 million comments, and now is pushing toward 23 million, with over a half million in the last month, many of those since the order was circulated.

Sen Kamala Harris (D-CA) is nearing her goal of 175,000 signatures on a petition to try and stop the Federal Communications Commission from rolling back Title II and eliminating most bright-line net neutrality rules."As I said in my letter to the FCC just a few months ago: This proposal is a grave threat to the idea that the internet should be free and accessible for all. It’s a danger to our economy and free speech rights and we must defeat it," she said. 

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze network neutrality comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing. NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions.

“Gathering and analyzing comments from the public is an important part of the Federal Communications Commission’s rulemaking process,” the American agency says on its website. But analyzing those comments increasingly means reading the thoughts of spambots. Automated comments are now part of political reality: During 2016’s US presidential race, a large proportion of tweets supporting both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came from automated accounts. These bots send messages en masse, originating from one source and usually conveying a particular ideology. Some are easy to spot.

[Commentary] From #BlackGirlsCode and #BlackMenSmile to #BlackLivesMatter and #BlackTwitter, the black internet is part of the 21st-century movement for dignity, rights and freedom—and it’s under attack. Since the Trump administration seems hell-bent on silencing black voices in the United States, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman and former Verizon executive Ajit Pai circulated a draft order to repeal net neutrality just two days before Thanksgiving.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that network neutrality protestors have "crossed a line" with hateful signs that target his children. It was reported Nov 27 there were protests outside Chairman Pai's home. “It certainly crosses a line with me,” Pai said.

[Commentary] In the rush to eliminate network neutrality protections, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai failed to hold a single public hearing, and has ignored the chorus of entrepreneurs, investors, businesses and citizens asking him to stop. Citizens across the political spectrum are now looking to their elected representatives to speak out on their behalf and call on Chairman Pai to cancel the vote. Chairman Pai’s plan is a radical break from FCC history and a fundamental departure from how the Internet has operated for the past 30 years.