In May of 2017, after FCC Chair Ajit Pai had announced plans to roll back rules guaranteeing net neutrality—the requirement that internet service providers treat all online traffic equally, a requirement that Pai succeeded in abolishing last December—the FCC’s web servers were flooded with traffic and briefly crashed.
What happened? According to Pai, the FCC was the target of a massive, malicious hack, a type of cyber attack known as a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack that overwhelmed the FCC site and shut down the commission’s servers. There was only one problem with that story. Pai made the whole thing up.
As the tech site Ars Technica reported, Pai admitted last week that no such hacking attack occurred—but he blamed the falsehood on the Obama administration, which Pai claimed had created a “culture” of lying.
“I am deeply disappointed that the FCC's former Chief Information Officer [David Bray], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable,” Pai wrote in a prepared statement.
But a group of congressional Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee did not find Pai’s excuse very persuasive, sending a sharply worded letter to the Donald Trump appointee on Tuesday, demanding to know why Pai lied about the phony cyber attack.
“It is troubling that you allowed the public myth created by the FCC to persist and your misrepresentation to remain uncorrected for over a year,” the four Democratic House members wrote. "This is despite repeated request by members of this Committee—as recently as July 25, 2018, in our oversight hearing—to provide additional information documenting the purported cyberattack.”
While Pai’s lie may have been bizarre, it could at least in theory have an influence on whether or not the net neutrality rules are restored. In May, the Senate passed a resolution to restore the Obama-era regulations, but House speaker Paul Ryan has refused to bring the net neutrality issue to a vote.
Under congressional rules, however, if Democrats can get 218 House members to sign a petition calling for a vote, Ryan would be required to bring the matter to the floor. So far, however, only one Republican—Mike Coffman of Colorado—has signed on.
So if it wasn’t a hacking attack, what did cause the FCC servers to crash on May 7, 2017. In fact, the culprit was comedian John Oliver, who on his HBO program Last Week Tonight called on his fans to bombard the FCC with comments opposing repeal of net neutrality. The former Daily Show correspondent apparently has so many fans that the FCC’s servers could not handle the volume of traffic.
Photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
