New York accuses broadband companies of making false comments about net neutrality and Internet news

The four-year investigation concluded that U.S. broadband companies hid their involvement in the campaign, resulting in 18 million false comments on the hot button issue, New York’s attorney general said.

The largest U.S. broadband companies funded a “secret campaign” in 2017 to generate millions of false comments from the Federal Communications Commission to cover the repeal of the regulator’s prediction of net neutrality rules, New York law enforcement chiefs said.

The state concluded in a four-year investigation that companies had concealed their involvement in the effort, which resulted in 18 million false comments out of a total of 22 million on the hot vote issue, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Thursday.

In a Republican-led vote in 2017, the FCC ignored broadband neutrality rules that would allow members of broadband Internet traffic to please members.

He later dismissed calls to delay the completion of the rules, saying it was not based on suspicious submissions. Ajit Pai, then President of the FCC for President Donald Trump, said the move would “restore Internet freedom.”

“Almost all of the comments and messages submitted by the broadband industry to the FCC and Congress were fake, signed using the names and addresses of millions of people, without their knowledge or permission,” a Democrat James said in the statement.

The comments “did not reflect the real views of the people, as more than 8.5 million comments used real people’s names and personal information without their knowledge or permission.”

New York said in its report that the campaign was conducted through a non-profit American broadband team. Organizations AT&T Inc., Charter Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. it lists members, as well as the CTIA commercial groups that represent major wireless carriers, NCTA – The Internet & Television Association and the USTelecom-The Broadband Association.

No one from the company or trading group responded immediately to the email commenting on the report.

Jessica Rosenworcel, the incumbent president of the FCC, a Democrat nominated by President Joe Biden, who endorses rules of net neutrality, said the report acted on the agency’s record of “overflowing fraud.”

“That was worrying at the time, because even then the problems with the record were obvious,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. “We need to learn and improve from those lessons because citizens deserve an open and fair opportunity to tell Washington what they think about policies that affect their lives.”