Millions of fake comments give a glimpse of the telecom industry's dark lobbying machine A new investigation has revealed that the broadband sector's 2017 campaign to repeal net neutrality laws was underpinned by fraud. In April 2017, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai made the defining decision of his highly controversial tenure. An appointee of Donald Trump who had worked as a lawyer for the telecom giant Verizon, Pai began the process of dismantling Obama-era legislation that had enshrined in law a fundamental principle of the open web: that telecom firms should treat all websites equally. By the end of the year, Pai had repealed the “net neutrality” legislation, sparking fears that telecom firms would give preferential treatment to the largest sites. Unlike many of the policy decisions that characterised Trump's presidency, the move didn't divide Americans along party political lines: it was universally unpopular, with 75 per cent of Republicans and 89 per cent of Democrats opposing it.