So yes they used the comments to justify their decision, but calling it a "wholesale manipulation of our democracy" is an overstatement as the decision never required democratic consensus.
… no?
> The proceeding generated a record-breaking number of comments — more than 22 million — and nearly 18 million were fake, the attorney general’s office found.
81% of the comments were astroturf.
It's the article-within-the-article, linked to at "second series of agreements secured".
>One of the first studies performed after the closure of the public commenting period, done on behalf of Broadband for America, which sought to repeal the Obama-era rules, found that 60% of the comments were in favor of retaining the current rules..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Individual_Freedo...
Bad people get away with everything...
The companies generating fake comments were likely doing so precisely to ensure this federal law did not become an issue. The thing that really annoys me about this stuff is not the outcome - the comments in favor of net neutrality were change.org caliber spam for the most part, and so the FCC had every reasonable right to ignore them.
It's that these companies did absolutely engage in a conspiracy to "sidestep" federal law, and did so by engaging in defacto identify theft on a massive scale. Conspiracy, a few hundred thousand charges of identity theft, fraud, and more? If an individual did this, they'd be looking at jail for the rest of their life. But these companies do it, and things like this don't even classify as a slap on the wrist. Our legal system is just completely and utterly dysfunctional when it comes to companies.
Corporations not only have personhood, but super personhood. They not only get all the rights and privileges of individuals, but seeming immunity from the law, as long as they earn enough money. And it's not only the inequity that bothers me, but the fact that this is clearly and overtly encouraging ever more awful behavior from corporations. Because they have no ethics, and they face no consequences of note. So why not?
Just to be clear, it sounds like here you are talking about the comments other than the one discussed in the article?
You are saying that the responses in favour of net neutrality (the ones which were proposing to keep the bylaws) were also astroturfed?
Or are you saying that they were somehow low in quality in your opinion but still coming from real humans?
How do you know this?
People just treated it like an anonymous opt-in opinion poll, and the results are pretty much what you'd expect. Some copy paste, a vast amount of low content stuff, and then some very low content stuff.
This reads like "after listening to the people, they can explain why what they're doing is necessary and ignore their complaints.
I'm not arguing what was done wasn't scummy, I don't see it as manipulating democracy.