Ajit Pai’s FCC lied about “DDoS” attack, ex-chair’s statement indicates

Enlarge / Tom Wheeler, when he was Federal Communications Commission Chairman, at left, listens to then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai testify before the House Judiciary Committee about Internet regulation on March 25, 2015. President Donald Trump promoted Pai to chairman to succeed Wheeler. (credit: Chip Somodvellia/Getty Images)

There was no DDoS attack against the Federal Communications Commission comments system in 2014, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week. Wheeler's statement disputes claims made by the FCC under current Chairman Ajit Pai, who is under fire for unproven claims about DDoS attacks.

The controversy began in May 2017 after Pai unveiled an early version of his plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC system for accepting public comments on Pai's plan failed just as many net neutrality supporters were trying to submit pro-net neutrality comments on the urging of comedian John Oliver.

The FCC claimed the May 2017 outage was caused by "multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)" rather than by the volume of legitimate pro-net neutrality comments or by a simple failure of the system. To bolster its case, Pai's FCC claimed that a similar outage during the 2014 net neutrality proceeding was also caused by a DDoS attack. But Wheeler, who was chairman at the time and led the implementation of strict net neutrality rules, says there was no such attack in 2014.

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