What happens when the telecoms operators break the law to end net neutrality? Nothing
Sometimes justice takes time, but it eventually comes. Other times, it doesn’t. When Donald Trump took over the White House in 2016, one of the first things he did was to carry out what he had previously agreed with the telecom lobby: he replaced the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with the extremely objectionable lobbyist Ajit Pai, setting in motion plans to end net neutrality in the United States.
Since the decision was to be subjected to a public consultation period, with the public invited to leave their comments on a website, the telecoms operators hired social media companies, LCX Digital Media, Lead ID, LLC and Ifficient Inc. to find consumers willing to support the end of net neutrality. Instead, the three fabricated several million comments with bots using forged identities, which flooded the FCC website with fake comments to the point that they brought down the FCC website for several days, making it impossible to access or separate genuine comments from forged ones, even though thousands of people whose comments appeared on the site denied making them. There were comments made by deceased people, comments made by people who had never accessed the site, comments that were simply made up, and many, many duplications.
