Advocacy Groups Urge FCC to Release Net Neutrality Complaints

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More than a dozen advocacy groups are urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week to release the text of 47,000 net neutrality complaints, which were requested under the Freedom of Information Act in May.

A letter co-signed by 16 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and OpenMedia, said that “every day of delay is one more day that the FCC shirks its duties.”

The letter, sent Monday and addressed to the five commissioners, claims that the FCC “has failed to make critical evidence available for public review and comment.”

“In the interest of proper rulemaking the FCC should immediately release the over 47,000 consumer complaints and the ombudsperson documents and allow the public sufficient time to review and comment on them,” the letter authors write. “This would allow the Commission and the public the ability to more adequately and fully assess the benefits to consumers and the behavior of ISPs since the 2015 Open Internet Order went into effect.”

The National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed the request in May, and so far it has yielded only a fraction of the complaints. The FCC released the text of 1,000 complaints, and said that redacting personally identifiable information from the remaining documents would be unreasonably burdensome. It counter-offered to provide an additional 2,000 complaints with accompanying documents.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai argued in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that because there was only one official complaint filed against an ISP since 2015’s Open Internet Order, the rules may be unnecessary. The open letter suggests that the “evidence of actual harm to consumers” Pai asks about in the NPRM may have been collected through the informal complaint process, yet the FCC is proceeding “without looking at any of its own evidence.”

“Currently, commission staffers are in the process of reviewing these documents and redacting any personal information,” a spokesperson for Pai told Ars Technica on Tuesday. “We anticipate releasing another batch of documents by the end of the week and will release the remainder as soon as we can.”

The NHMC filed a motion in July for the FCC to extend the net neutrality comment deadline until 60 days after it finished providing the NHMC with the requested documents. The FCC rejected the extension request (PDF). It subsequently extended the deadline by two weeks (PDF) to Aug. 30 following a request for an 8 week extension by 10 groups, including several signatories to Monday’s letter.