General Discussion

pecosbob

(7,533 posts) Tue Dec 4, 2018, 06:14 PM Dec 2018

'Ajit Pai has been able to escape scrutiny as head of Trump's FCC. That's about to change'.

Inside House Democrats’ Plans to Investigate the FCC and Net Neutrality

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/fcc-ajit-pai-house-democrats-investigations-net-neutrality-sinclair-att/

Comedians and the Federal Communications Commission have not always been the best of friends. But the conflict between HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the agency in charge of regulating the nation’s communications sector had nothing to do with the seven dirty words. Instead, it all started when Oliver told viewers to submit comments to the agency in an effort to revive net neutrality. The next day, the FCC claimed that an onslaught of comments following the segment had overwhelmed the agency’s comment system and had caused it to crash. The agency’s then-Chief Information Officer David Bray determined the large volume of comments had been the work of bots, the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, despite having experienced similar outages in 2014 after a different segment where Oliver urged his viewers to write the agency.

The problem? The alleged DDoS never happened. Over a year later, after an internal investigation into the matter was made public, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai admitted to Congress that the initial report that bots were responsible had been wrong; the system crashed because it couldn’t handle the number of authentic comments inspired by Oliver’s segment. After months of accusations from the press and lawmakers that the FCC had deceived the public about the attack, an answer was reached. But net neutrality was already dead. According to the agency’s own inspector general, the “FCC made several specific statements that we believe misrepresent facts about the event or provide misleading information [to Congress].”