The Hill reported that a letter has been forwarded to the Chairman of FCC asking the commission to holdup its vote planned on 14th December 2017 regarding Net Neutrality protection rollbacks. 28 U.S senators had signed the letter led by the U.S Senator Maggie Hassan. The letter pointed to alleged evidence that the public comments proposals were plentiful with falsified posts. The letter also said that a free and open internet is essential to ensuring a level of playing within online field online. The Senators said in the letter that they believe that the proposed action of the FCC may be based on an incomplete understanding of the public record in this proceeding. There is a good reason to accept that the record may be replete with counterfeit or falsified comments.
A number of groups have discovered evidence that many of the 22 million public comments on the FCC proposal were allegedly fake or falsified. The report of data scientist, Jeff Kao pointed out that more than 1.3 million comments were counterfeit and supposedly came from a central source. The Pew Research Center discovered that more than half of the comments were supposedly came from temporary, duplicate or fake email addresses. Some comments used identities of other people without their knowledge. The Attorney General of New York State, Eric Schneiderman has forwarded a letter to the Chairman of the FCC for not looking into the fake comments and set up a portal. It is due to The New York residents should see if their identities were allegedly used during the time period of public comments.