Responding to a letter from two senators, Ajit Pai says FCC hopes to rebuild and re-engineer its comment system after millions of fake comments were posted
This morning, James Grimaldi reported … Tweets: @jamesvgrimaldi : FCC proposes rebuilding online comment system after @poverberg and I revealed thousands as fake in @WSJ investigation. http://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The FCC's comment system has been broken since the 2017 net-neutrality proceeding, when the agency's own API let attackers file more than 128,000 identical comments and impersonation campaigns pushed the total into the hundreds of thousands — including 450,000 comments filed using people's names without their permission. A Wall Street Journal investigation by James Grimaldi documented the scale of the fakery, prompting two senators to demand answers.
Pai's letter response is the first formal acknowledgment that the system needs more than cleanup — the FCC now says it wants to rebuild and re-engineer how public comments are submitted. The credibility stakes are high: Pai had already spent 2017–2018 defending the claim that a May 2017 outage was a DDoS attack, a story he later walked back in Senate testimony while saying the inspector general asked him to stay quiet until its report.
First-order effects
- The two senators get a direct written commitment from Pai that the FCC will rebuild the comment system rather than merely purge fraudulent entries — a shift from defending the record to fixing the infrastructure.
- Every party to the net-neutrality docket faces a legitimacy problem: with millions of fake comments admitted, the existing comment record can no longer be cited cleanly by either side.
Second-order effects
- Any rebuilt system almost certainly closes the open API path that enabled bulk filing, trading frictionless mass submission for identity checks — raising the cost of organized comment campaigns for every advocacy group, not just fraudsters.
- Congressional oversight becomes the enforcement mechanism: the senators' letter-and-response exchange sets a template other committees can use to force agencies to disclose infrastructure failures.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, federal e-comment systems converge on verified-identity submission, ending the era of anonymous bulk filings that made the 2017 flood possible — a structural change the FCC itself confirmed when it later moved to scrap and replace the Electronic Comment Filing System entirely.
- Agency claims about cyberattacks come under tighter scrutiny: the gap between Pai's initial DDoS account and the OIG's findings shows how infrastructure incidents become political liability when independent investigators can audit them.
The trend: Government public-comment infrastructure is shifting from open, anonymous submission toward identity-verified systems, driven by coordinated fraud that regulators can no longer ignore.