Congress has one last chance to undo the Federal Communication Commissions 2017 repeal of net neutrality protectionsbut it only has until Dec. 21 to do it. The open-internet rules officially went off the books in June, but Democrats in Congress have been organizing since the end of last year to pass a Congressional Review Act resolution to undo the FCCs repeal. In May, three Republican votes pushed the Senate over the edge to narrowly pass a bill to restore net neutrality and rescind rules passed under current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. After that, the onus went to the House, where 218 signatures are needed for a vote to proceed. Right now, however, there are 180 representatives signed on, mostly Democrats. Its a very, very long shot, but if advocates fighting to restore net neutrality are able to gin up the votes in the next week, theres a chance to block Pais vision of an internet in which companies like Comcast and AT&T are legally allowed to shut down or slow down access to whole parts of the web.
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The deadline to force a floor vote for this session of Congress was Dec. 10, but since the congressional session has been extended to Dec. 21 over funding disputes, net neutrality supporters have a bit more time. For the gambit to work, at least 20 Republicans and every Democrat would have to get on board with the CRA resolution. (Republicans are certainly familiar with how CRAs work, because theyve used the same process to reverse more than a dozen regulatory actions since Donald Trump won the election in 2016but those were rules passed under President Obama.) If internet advocates are able to spur a quick and unexpected legislative turnaround, it wouldnt be the first time. In 2012, outrage over two obscure intellectual property bills that would have drastically changed the way were able to share media onlinethe Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Actbecame so boisterous that the number of Congress members who opposed the bills jumped from 31 to 101 after a single day of action. The legislation died. At the moment, the issue on the table is simply getting enough signatures for a vote on a Congressional Review Act to be possiblenot the vote itself.

There are currently 16 Democrats who havent signed on to vote on the Congressional Review Act resolution, according to the watchdog group Fight for the Future, and theyve taken thousands of dollars in campaign donations from internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, or the National Cable Television Association, a trade group representing internet service providers. Receiving campaign contributions from an internet service provider in no way destines an elected official to oppose net neutrality. As Vice notes, the Democratic representative who introduced the CRA petition, Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, has received donations from the National Cable Television Association. Still, choosing to abstain on an issue that the vast majority of your party supports and that the vast majority of Americans who commented to the FCC on the issue supportedwhile receiving donations from the ISPs is not a good look.

The 23 million comments the FCC collected on last years net neutrality proceeding amounted to the most public participation on any issue in the history of the agency. And while millions of those comments certainly came from concerned Americans attempting to have their say in one of the most important decisions facing the future of the internet, many did not. The process that led to the vote to undo the Obama-era rules was probably the most corrupted public comment period in the agencys history.

As many as nine and a half million people had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments, which is a crime under both federal and state laws, according to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel.