Thursday, December 06, 2018

The Russians Messed with Net Neutrality

I knew it! No way were there ANY Americans filing in favor of getting rid of Net Neutrality. Turns out, I was right. From Tom Taylor's NOW column...

FCC Chairman Pai admits Russian hackers filed a half-million Net Neutrality comments. It’s a “fact,” he says in a filing, that about 500,000 comments in last year’s Net Neutrality proceeding came from Russian email addresses. But there’s more. Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel says “As many as nine and a half million people had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments, which is a crime under both federal and state laws.” Believe it or not, there’s something called “FakeMailGenerator.com,” and Rosenworcel says “nearly eight million comments were filed from email domains associated with” that site. Republican Commissioner Pai was elevated to Chairman in early 2017 and wanted to erase away the Net Neutrality policy of his Democratic predecessor Tom Wheeler – which aimed to prevent broadband suppliers from favoring certain kinds of traffic.

To those of you who say, "Nothing happened after we got rid of Net Neutrality", I say "Just wait." That's what the telecom giants are doing. They are waiting. Getting all their plans in order. Using their unexpected inactivity to fight it again if necessary (it will be necessary).