They may be routinely ignored, but there is a price to pay for ignoring the law. Even parking tickets you can brush off for a while but you'll pay (a lot) later.
Or is something different for this administration?
While I don't agree with GP (like, not at all), Pai has shown repeatedly that this appears to be true. The FCC remains completely unchallenged and OP.
Huh? All I'm saying is FCC comments don't matter. And therefore neither do fake ones. Not sure what you're referring to...
If the comments matter only because the law requires them, that's a very weak argument.
If the law requires that they be considered in the process of creating policy, then fraudulently spamming comments is a direct attempt to subvert the policy making function of the FCC.
We cavalierly assume the comments do not matter because of an underlying assumption; that FCC Chair Pai will not actually consider them regardless of their contents, and that he functionally controls the decision to enact or repeal NN regulations. Imagine if we had a different FCC chair - would the comments still not matter?
There are two problems preventing the comments from fulfilling their intended function, but the existence of a second problem (Pai's refusal to discharge the duties of his office honorably) does not negate the first (the fraudulent corruption of the public comments record).
The important distinction here is that they have to be considered as comments, not votes. For example, if a whole lot of comments say more or less the same thing, then that only counts as one comment. In this case the politics had already been decided so no comment could affect the general outcome. In a very real sense the comments did not matter in this case. In other situations they can matter.
The pointless distraction related to the various attempts to spam the FCC comments in the end prevented actual politics that could of possibly retained net neutrality.
Two negatives doesn't make a positive sadly.
- FCC comments has to matters
- Fake FCC comments shouldn't be accepted
Theses are 2 problems currently, both have to be fixed, having them both doesn't make them alright.
Even if they did matter - the spam comments are largely the same as reddit or HN spam i.e. as long as they can be filtered out it doesn't really matter.