FCC Refuses Records For Investigation Into Fake Net Neutrality Comments (variety.com)

"FCC general counsel Tom Johnson has told the New York State attorney general that the FCC is not providing information for his investigation into fake net-neutrality comments, saying those comments did not affect the review, and challenging the state's ability to investigate the feds." Variety has more: The FCC's general counsel, in a letter to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, also dismissed his concerns that the volume of fake comments or those made with stolen identities have "corrupted" the rule-making process... He added that Schneiderman's request for logs of IP addresses would be "unduly burdensome" to the commission, and would "raise significant personal privacy concerns."

Amy Spitalnick, Schneiderman's press secretary, said in a statement that the FCC "made clear that it will continue to obstruct a law enforcement investigation. It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem. To be clear, impersonation is a violation of New York law," she said... "The only privacy jeopardized by the FCC's continued obstruction of this investigation is that of the perpetrators who impersonated real Americans."
One of the FCC's Democratic commissioners claimed that this response "shows the FCC's sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process... Moreover, the FCC refuses to look into how nearly half a million comments came from Russian sources."

Comments

Re:Consequences or Endless Loop

[Baron_Yam]

>Either we break up the companies doing this

You need a new anti-monopoly law that doesn't depend on investigating complaints. I like the idea of raising their taxation based on their market share.

And then you have to nationalize common infrastructure, because it's really a bad idea to have every private company laying their own fiber or cable just like it'd be a bad idea if all roads were toll roads and different companies were not allowed to connect to each other.

Something tells me both those ideas run very much contrary to deeply-held American economic ideals and will never happen.

Re:Consequences or Endless Loop

[RazorSharp]

I like the idea of raising their taxation based on their market share.

Me too. This is the type of tax reform I could get behind. It would discourage large corporate mergers because, if the merger were to jump them up to a way higher tax bracket, it wouldn't make sense to merge.