FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (left) and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr (right) talk before the start of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018.
Bill Clark
FCC chairman Ajit Pai was on the defense Thursday during a Senate oversight hearing when he was questioned about why he didn’t correct the record earlier about an alleged cyberattack on the agency at the height of the controversial debate on net neutrality last year.
Pai defended his decision not to talk about the findings of an FCC inspector general report, which was released last week and determined there was no evidence that such an attack actually happened.
In a testy exchange during the hearing between Pai and Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, Pai admitted he had had doubts, but kept quiet because the IG’s office had asked him to stay quiet while it referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation.
“I made a judgement,” he said. “Even though, I knew I’d be falsely attacked.”
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The back and forth came a little more than a week after the FCC’s Inspector General report concluded that the FCC’s former chief information officer had misidentified the cause of a brief outage in the agency’s online comment system during the debate over repealing popular 2015 net neutrality rules. David Bray, who had also served under the Obama administration called the outage a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
But the IG determined that what actually happened was the same thing that happened in 2014 when the public comment system failed during the previous debate over net neutrality. That outage, as was the case for the 2017 outage, occurred just after comedian John Oliver urged net neutrality supporters watching his weekly HBO show to flood the agency with comments.
Still, in spite of skepticism among press, technology experts, and even some members of Congress, Pai and his staff supported the CIO’s assertion there had been a DDoS attack.
“The tech community said that doesn’t make any sense…Sen. Wyden and I said it didn’t make sense…You told Congress a federal crime was committed,” Sen.Schatz questioned. “Why didn’t you entertain any of those quite reasonable doubts that were out there?”
Pai shot back that he had had doubts. But his hands were tied.
“Once we knew the conclusion, it was hard to stay quiet,” he said. He added that he and his staff had to consider whether to break the IG’s request for confidentiality with requests from Congress and the public for more information.
Schatz acknowledged that Pai was in a tough position, but he said he still couldn’t “imagine there was not another way to deal” with Congress’s oversight of the agency.
The comments were made as Pai and his fellow FCC commissioners testified Thursday before a Senate Commerce committee, which oversees the agency. While several issues were brought up at the hearing, including 5G wireless, rural broadband, and robocalls, the repeal of net neutrality and the political divide between Democrats and Republicans remained stark.
Even though the Obama-era rules, which prevented internet service providers from blocking or slowing access and prohibits carriers from charging internet companies a fee to access customers faster, officially expired in June, Democrats in Congress are trying to reinstate them through a Congressional Review Act resolution. The measure has already passed the Senate and must be passed by the House by the end of the year and signed into law by President Trump in order to take effect.
In his opening remarks to the hearing, Pai called Democrats’ fears that the repeal of the rules would kill the internet greatly exaggerated.
“It has now been 67 days since the repeal of the previous administration’s utility-style Internet regulations took effect,” he said. “The internet is still open and free.”
In his questioning, Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who has led the CRA effort in the Senate, pointed out that it’s likely we haven’t seen changes to the internet because there are a number of lawsuits underway challenging the FCC’s repeal.
The lone Democrat on the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, concurred. She pointed to the fact that several states are pushing through legislation to create their own net neutrality rules and the fact that governors in many states have also signed executive orders banning the states from doing business with companies that don’t comply with net neutrality as a sign that these are popular protections Americans want in place.
She said that as of today ISPs have the legal right to block access to any website or service online. They also have the technology and the business incentive to do it. And she added it is only a matter of time before these companies exert this power over consumers.
“It’s not good for anyone who consumes or creates content online,” she said.
Net neutrality supporters say they aren’t buying Pai’s claims regarding the alleged cyberattack.
“Today Pai admitted he knew that the alleged cyber attack was bogus months ago,” Sarah Roth-Gaudette, executive director if the grassroots group, Fight for the Future, said in a statement. “No matter which side of the aisle you’re on, you should be completely outraged.”
She also called Pai’s claims that the sky has not fallen since net neutrality was placed, “bogus and naive.”
“With a vote to overturn the repeal passed in the Senate and pending in the House, and 23 Attorneys General suing the FCC over it, Internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T aren’t going to restructure the entire Internet while the heat is on,” she said. “The FCC’s net neutrality repeal is not only undemocratic, it’s illegitimate. And Congress must reverse it by passing the CRA as soon as possible.”
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