New York's AG: three companies accused of falsifying millions of public comments to back the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal agreed to pay $615K in penalties
Three companies accused of falsifying millions of public comments to support the contentious 2017 federal repeal of net neutrality rules …
Context & Ripple Effects
This settlement closes a six-year investigation that began when the New York AG said the FCC ignored repeated requests for the logs behind its comment flood in 2017, and escalated with subpoenas to 14 trade groups, businesses, and advocacy organizations in 2018. By 2021, the AG's office had concluded that roughly 18 million of the 22 million-plus comments the FCC received — including 8.5 million funded by the largest US ISPs — were fake.
First-order effects
- The three companies named in the settlement pay $615,000 in penalties, converting the NY AG's multi-year fraud investigation into a resolved enforcement action against the comment-furnishing vendors.
Second-order effects
- The ISPs whose funded comments made up the 8.5 million documented in the 2021 findings now have the underlying conduct formally adjudicated as fraud, keeping reputational and legal exposure alive even though they were not the parties penalized.
Third-order effects
- With the FCC having stonewalled rather than audited its own docket, state attorneys general are establishing themselves as the de facto enforcers of public-comment integrity — pointing federal agencies toward identity verification and audit trails for rulemaking records.
The trend: State attorneys general are filling the enforcement vacuum around federal rulemaking records, treating mass-comment fraud as a prosecutable offense rather than an agency housekeeping problem.