Government Accountability Office to Investigate Sketchy Net Neutrality Comments Left on the FCC’s Website ⇥ gizmodo.com

Tom McKay, Gizmodo:

Under the tenure of its new Donald Trump-appointed chair Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission recently revoked Barack Obama-era regulations mandating service providers abide by net neutrality rules. But on the way there, the agency had to overlook millions of allegedly fraudulent comments submitted to its Electronic Comment Filing System — likely corrupting one of the only methods for the public to make its voice heard during the rule-making process.

Now, the Government Accountability Office has said it will investigate the “possibility of fraud and identify theft” in the public comments on the FCC’s decision to eliminate the net neutrality rules, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday. But there’s one major caveat: It won’t do so for five months.

A reminder that an unnamed senior FCC official specifically cited spam during a press briefing as a reason why the commission ignored effectively all of the comments they received.