ABSTRACT

E-rulemaking, adopted over a decade ago, allows federal agencies to use technology to provide electronic submission of public comment for a rule through the Federal Register. Some scholars suggested that this could create a space for deliberative democracy and improved regulatory outcomes. Yet, has e-rulemaking achieved its goals? The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Net Neutrality Rule received millions of fake public comments submitted by “bots,” many from outside the U.S. The central focus of this exploratory project is to use the e-rulemaking literature as a descriptive baseline to examine original interview data from 32 agency rule-writers and program managers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA, from 2002–2019, served as the managing partner of e-rulemaking initiatives. Our focus is to determine what, if anything, the agency did to identify bots or to screen out fake comments. The findings suggest the 2002 E-Government Act did not anticipate the emergence of bots and thus fails to provide agencies with sufficient guidance on how to identify and treat bots and fake comments.

摘要

十多年前采用的电子规则制定允许联邦机构使用技术通过联邦公报为规则提供公众意见的电子提交. 一些学者认为，这可以为协商民主和改善监管结果创造空间。然而，电子规则制定是否实现了目标？联邦通信委员会 (FCC) 的网络中立规则收到了数百万条由“机器人”提交的虚假公众评论，其中许多来自美国以外。这个探索性项目的中心重点是使用电子规则制定文献作为描述性基线来检查原始采访来自环境保护署 (EPA) 的 32 位机构规则制定者和项目经理的数据。从 2002 年到 2019 年，EPA 担任电子规则制定计划的管理合作伙伴。我们的重点是确定该机构在识别机器人或筛选虚假评论方面做了什么（如果有的话）。