John Oliver has a brief update on his net neutrality call-to-arms

John Oliver has a net neutrality update
(Image credit: Last Week Tonight)

Last week, John Oliver warned that Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai was taking aim at net neutrality, and encouraged his viewers to write the FCC to register their opinion on the proposal. It worked, apparently. "The FCC site did get a ton of comments — the number is up to around 1.6 million, and those comments have come from all quarters of the political spectrum," Oliver said in a Last Week Tonight update Sunday night.

Not everyone was celebrating the burst of wonky civic engagement. The FCC complained about hacktivism aimed at the public-comment section, and some conservative commentators, like Liz Harrington at the Washington Free Beacon, discounted all the comments because some of the commenters used obviously fake names. "She is right, some of the comments on the site were faked — but interestingly, many of those were on the other side of this issue," Oliver said, including 128,000 identical comments against net neutrality that appear to be from spam bots.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.