Twenty-seven U.S. senators and New York’s attorney general asked federal regulators Monday to delay a vote on scrapping open internet rules amid concerns the public comment docket is filled with fake comments.

Democratic Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said an unprecedented 23 million comments were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission about net neutrality. His office suspects as many as a million of those are linked to stolen identities.

The senators, led by Democrat Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, wrote to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai expressing concern over reports that bots filed hundreds of thousands of comments.

[A video from PBS explains net neutrality at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0X4Ogjg5MU ]

A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican who backs overturning the current rules, said in response to Schneiderman’s comments on Monday, “This is an attempt by people who want to keep the Obama Administration’s heavy-handed Internet regulations to delay the vote because they realize that their effort to defeat the plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled.”

The spokesperson said that Schneiderman had not identified as fake any comments that were used as part of Pai’s proposal.

The FCC is set to vote Dec. 14 whether to scrap Obama-era rules around open internet access that prevent phone and cable companies from favoring certain websites and apps.

“Identity theft”

Schneiderman said that his office believed the identities of Americans were stolen and used to submit comments on net neutrality to the FCC. “This is akin to identity theft on a massive scale,” he said.

People were invited to submit their views on net neutrality to the FCC earlier this year. The current net neutrality rules, approved during the Obama administration, barred internet providers from deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic to or from specific websites and apps. Under new rules proposed by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, internet providers would be allowed to prioritize content but would need to publicly disclose they are doing so.

The FCC does not require commenters to verify their identity, and features on the FCC website allow multiple comments to be uploaded from the same computer at once.

Last week, Schneiderman’s office unveiled an online tool that helped people see if their names had been used without their knowledge on comments submitted to the FCC. By Monday, Schneiderman said, they had received more than 3,000 responses — including, he said, from a man who said his deceased mother’s name had been used.

The identity of one of Schneiderman’s staff members was also used without her permission, he said.

“The slowdown in investment is destroying jobs and risks a big future tax hike to make up for lost private investment. Save American jobs by repealing Net Neutrality,” the comment, which used the staffer’s name and childhood address in Rhode Island, said. The same language was also used in other comments submitted to the FCC under other people’s names.

Call for investigation

Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democratic commissioners currently on the FCC, also called for the vote to be delayed pending a full investigation.

“The FCC is on course to eliminate net neutrality guided by a record corrupted by hundreds of thousands of filings with stolen identities,” Rosenworcel said.

Schneiderman did not specify if the comments his office identified as fake were primarily in support of or against the current net neutrality rules.

Separate independent studies also found high levels of suspected fake comments. The Pew Research Center found that 57% of comments submitted to the FCC regarding the upcoming net neutrality vote used temporary or duplicate email addresses.

A report commissioned by Broadband for America, which is backed by major telecommunications companies including AT&T and Comcast, found that the vast majority of personalized or unique comments — that is, the comments least likely to have been faked — were in favor of the current net neutrality rules. (AT&T is in the process of acquiring Time Warner, CNN’s parent company.)

The study found 1.52 million comments with language that only appeared once in the FCC database in favor of the current rules, and only 23,000 against. “Presumably, these comments originated from individuals that took the time to type a personalized comment. Although these comments represent less than 10% of the total, this is a notable difference,” the report said.