FCC Seen Unlikely to Delay Thursday's Vote on Net Neutrality NPRM
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is under intense pressure to delay Thursday’s vote on the net neutrality rulemaking notice. But industry officials say a delay is extremely unlikely. The FCC indicated in a special sunshine notice Thursday the vote is still on (see 1705110038). House Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Communications Subcommittee ranking member Mike Doyle, D-Pa., sent a letter to Pai Thursday seeking a delay (see 1705110066). “1 million #netneutrality comments already filed. Agree w/ @FrankPallone & @USRepMikeDoyle -- extend comment period,” Commissioner Mignon Clyburn tweeted in response.
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The controversy over net neutrality also affected FCC IT. The Electronic Comment Filing System had glitches at various points last week, some after alleged distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) (see 1705110051) and amid ECFS getting an unusually high volume of comments, agency and industry officials told us. Thursday, it got 400,000 comments, a daily record, a representative of the agency said. Amid the deluge, the FCC paused posting any comments on ECFS all day Thursday and Friday, with hopes they will become publicly available early this week.
Pai, as a commissioner, asked ex-Chairman Tom Wheeler to delay a vote on the 2015 rules, but his requests were denied, industry officials noted Friday. “No way this proceeding is delayed,” said a former spectrum official. “There are already over 1 million comments in the record and no sign that public engagement has been or will be curtailed.” A commission spokesman declined to comment.
“Given the divisiveness of the … issue, any delay in the net neutrality NRPM would simply extend the vitriol,” said Roger Entner, analyst at Recon Analytics. “It is not like something new will be discovered.”
“Delay is unlikely,” conceded Matt Wood, Free Press policy director. Free Press plans a demonstration Thursday to protest the order.
USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter countered the recent attack on Pai and the net neutrality NPRM by HBO comedian John Oliver (see 1705080042). NPRM comments "are designed to elicit substantive policy recommendations,” Spalter wrote in a Friday opinion piece in The Hill. “Thankfully, we are not yet governed by online flash polls. We all need a real national and public debate about how to secure our internet freedoms, not a few dozen Twitter likes for that time you helped crash a government website.” Municipal ISPs urged Pai to move forward on a vote (see 1705120039), which the chairman cheered.
Human Rights Watch said in a blog post Friday people should file comments at the FCC using a webpage unveiled by Oliver that redirects to the FCC comment page. “If you care about human rights and net neutrality, head over to John’s http://gofccyourself.com/, which greatly simplifies the FCC’s Kafkaesque comments submission portal and tell the FCC that you oppose Pai’s plan and that it should uphold the existing net neutrality rules as well as their Title II classification necessary to enforce them,” the group said.
The agency hasn't lost any comments received by ECFS, it's just holding them for release while some IT tweaks are made that could improve timeliness of releasing future filings such as those made in bulk, the agency's representative said. "They are there. They are just not showing up.” Outside of the DDoS attack Monday and parts of Wednesday, when RSS feeds linked to ECFS were getting a "massive" number of queries, the system should be working normally, the representative said. Some communications lawyers and our own experience suggested otherwise, with the system not available at various times on various browsers during much of last week. The FCC representative encouraged people experiencing ECFS problems to email ecfshelp@fcc.gov and send screen shots.
Some FCC staffers suggested Mozilla's Firefox may be partly to blame, as some versions of the popular web browser wouldn't let users see most ECFS filings at many points last week, including Friday. One indication the problems may be partly linked to Firefox is that on Friday full ECFS functionality appeared to be available via Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but not the Mozilla browser.
Mozilla was investigating, a spokesman said. "Mozilla quickly diagnosed and reported this issue" via Webcompat.com, its spokesman said. "Mozilla’s web compatibility team did not have any previous reports of this issue, but we will be reaching out to the FCC about a potential fix." The FCC representative said the problem appears to be happening with only the latest versions of Firefox.
Some have been skeptical DDoS attacks were to blame for ECFS problems, saying instead the FCC IT problems are due to the agency being unprepared to handle many comments. A "much more likely explanation: the FCC’s system is unprepared to handle large amounts of comments, and turned away tens of thousands of people trying to comment in support of net neutrality," said Fight for the Future Thursday. "The FCC should immediately release its logs to an independent security analyst or major news outlet to verify exactly what happened last night." That won't happen, because those logs have IP addresses that users haven't given permission to share, the commission's representative said Friday. “When there are not additional variables present, we can receive a lot of comments."