Report: FCC Lied Re Net Neutrality ‘Cyber Attack’ On Website

In May of last year, when it became clear that the newly-Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission, chaired by Donald Trump appointee Ajit Pai, was determined to do away with Obama-era net neutrality rules, comedian John Oliver, host of the HBO program Last Week Tonight,  asked his viewers to bombard the FCC’s web site with positive comments about net neutrality. But rather than acknowledge the tidal wave of opposition to getting rid of the open internet rules, Pai and the FCC instead fabricated a story about a “cyber attack” to explain why the site crashed, according to reporting Tuesday by the technology news site Gizmodo. The public commenting process around the net neutrality repeal, which has been overwhelmingly in favor of retaining net neutrality, has been fraught with questions and scandal. Despite polls showing broad support for net neutrality from both Democrats and Republicans, the FCC’s site received millions of comments in favor of doing away with the rules. But about 2 million comments posted on the FCC site were later found to be bogus, many posted by bots and activist organizations using the stolen identities of actual Americans, both living and deceased. Pai and the FCC have not offered any explanation about where the fake comments came from or who posted them, despite (as AVN.com reported) the fact that two United States Senators found that their own identities were used to post fake comments—and demanded an explanation for same from Pai last month. On May 7 of last year, during his HBO broadcast, Oliver made a passionate plea to his viewers to click over to the FCC site and post comments supporting net neutrality there. Oliver’s fans took his advice, posting so many comments in such a short space of time that the FCC site was knocked offline. It's unclear how many emails it took to accomplish that "feat," but the answer is likely in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. But rather than acknowledge the effectiveness of Oliver’s on-air request, or the swell of opposition to the pending net neutrality repeal, the FCC claimed that it had been the victim of a “Distributed Denial of Service,” or DDoS, attack, according to Gizmodo’s analysis of more than 1,000 FCC emails. “The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred—not to the reporters who’ve requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who’ve demanded to see it,” Gizmodo reported.  Rather than simply acknowledge that Oliver’s campaign had worked, the FCC issued yet another phony cyberattack story, claiming that a crash of the site in 2014, when Democrat Tom Wheeler chaired the five-member board, was also caused by a cyberattack—thus purportedly showing evidence of a pattern of hacking against the FCC site. There was an actual site crash in 2014, but that also came after an on-air appeal by Oliver for net neutrality comments. At that time, the Democrat-controlled FCC did not attribute the site crash to malicious hacking. An FCC official from the Obama era told Gizmodo that there was no credible evidence that an attack had occurred. “Net neutrality” refers to the set of regulations that prevent internet access providers such as AT&T, Verizon and other large corporations from granting traffic to and from some sites access to an “internet fast lane” while other sites get their data choked off or blocked. Net neutrality is especially important for the online porn industry, because porn sites are acutely vulnerable to censorship for political reasons—or because internet companies could see porn as a potential goldmine, blocking access to sites to anyone not willing to pay a premium fee over and above their regular monthly access subscription. Photos by Gage Skidmore/Steve Jennings/Wikimedia Commons