Net neutrality may be dead, but questions remain about how seriously the Federal Communications Commission considered comments from the public.  

The FCC's system for submitting those comments was a hot mess. Two million of the 22 million comments submitted used stolen identities, some of whom were dead, including actress Patty Duke, who died in 2016. Nearly 8 million comments used email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com. About half a million were sent from Russian email addresses. And of the emails that came from legitimate email addresses, the vast majority were form letters originating from the same pro and anti-net neutrality groups.  

Then there was the controversy over a supposed cyber-attack on the comment system that temporarily shut down the platform on exactly the same day thousands of net neutrality supporters responded to comedian John Oliver's call to flood the agency with comments.

The whole debacle has highlighted some shortcomings in developing public policy in the digital age where hundreds of thousands -- if not millions of comments -- can be filed with the click of a button and flood a docket, and any name can be used to submit a comment. Clearly, this is not what Congress envisioned when it enacted the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946 to ensure the public had a say in crafting public policy.