Pai’s agency is now facing numerous lawsuits for refusing to reveal conversations with ISP lobbyists about the plot to kill net neutrality, declining to publish net neutrality ailments filed with the agency, declining to be honest about a DDoS attack the FCC apparently prepared to downplay the “John Oliver effect,” and for ignoring FOIA requests related to its failure to police website comment fraud through the public comment period.
You’ll recall that time and time again, Pai has tried to claim that net neutrality isn’t a real difficulty and that the abuses conceived by letting giants like AT&T and Comcast run roughshod over an uncompetitive broadband sector are largely dreamed. As such, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition back in May to obtain the 45,000 customer net neutrality complaints filed since the states took effect in 2015, arguing that they might just show useful to the conversation given the FCC’s claim that net neutrality isn’t a real problem.
Initially, the FCC spent much of this year stalled in the publicity of the charges, asking that making them public would be too “burdensome” for bureau staff. After growing legal and public pressure, the FCC finally delivered upwards of 60,000 pages-worth of complaints by consumers who say their ISP behaved anti-competitively in the destruction of net neutrality. But the agency is still refusing to admit these complaints in the net neutrality movement docket, and refuses to include details on how ISPs replied to these complaints in the docket either:
“The FCC has not provided any additional records since we filed an Application for Inspection on November 14,” NHMC Special Policy Advisor Gloria Tristani told News today. Besides carrier replies, “we are missing other records as well, such as attachments to customer complaints, customer rebuttals, etc.” The FCC has not demonstrated why it didn’t provide those documents, according to the NHMC.”
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