Net Who-trality: Revisiting the FCC Fake Comment Scandal

The talk revisits the flood of comments sent to the FCC in 2017 while the agency weighed rolling back net neutrality rules. The speaker says roughly 18 million of the roughly 22 million comments were later confirmed fake, and that millions carried real people's names without their consent. Before getting to the investigation, the talk gives a short history of net neutrality, covering the 1934 Communications Act, the Title I and Title II split, and the 2015 Open Internet Order, and explains why the current legal fight is still unsettled.

The core of the talk is how the speaker tried to trace the comments to their sources. Freedom of Information Act requests to the FCC and the General Services Administration for API keys, submission logs and bulk CSV uploads were refused at first, which led to a lawsuit, partial court rulings and a settlement. The speaker walks through the data formats, the gap between timestamps in the API system and the comment system, and the fuzzy matching used to link submissions to the people and organizations behind them. Attribution relied on shared IP addresses, email domains, API key registration details and open-source lookups.

The talk closes with a search site built on the released data. It links to each comment on the FCC's own website instead of republishing personal details. The speaker notes that the fake submissions were easy to spot because they were sloppy, that more careful campaigns would be harder to trace, and that people should not trust comments they cannot verify.