After Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, announced his intention to roll back Obama-era net-neutrality guidelines, his agency opened its Web site for a mandatory public comment period, during which Americans could give their opinions on the proposal to scrap guidelines intended to protect consumers and prevent I.S.P.s from interfering with Internet traffic. A record-breaking 22 million comments were left, far outstripping the prior record of 3.7 million set during the previous net-neutrality proceeding. But it quickly became clear that, while the public comment forum helped to pass net-neutrality rules in 2015, this time around it was harnessed by bots and fake users seeking to overhaul it.

On Tuesday, after the F.C.C. confirmed its plans to dismantle the guidelines, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman drew attention to the embattled comments section in an open letter to Pai, in which he explained that his office spent six months investigating hundreds of thousands of net-neutrality comments left on the F.C.C. Web site under the names and addresses of Americans who didn’t write them. When his office requested the commission’s cooperation in investigating the fake comments, it offered “no substantive response,” ignoring multiple requests for records pertaining to the open comment period.

“The perpetrator or perpetrators attacked what is supposed to be an open public process by attempting to drown out and negate the views of the real people, businesses, and others who honestly commented on this important issue,” Schneiderman wrote, arguing that the fake comments were similar to identity theft on a “massive scale.” Schneiderman’s office first reached out to the F.C.C. in June, making nine different requests this year for access to the F.C.C.’s records. “If law enforcement can’t investigate and (where appropriate) prosecute . . . the door is open for it to happen again and again,” he wrote.

The public comment section was plagued with problems from the outset. Anti-net-neutrality spammers flooded the comment section with thousands of identical remarks that read, “The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation”; each comment seemed to come from a real person, with an address attached. Meanwhile, a telecom-based study found that many of the comments on the F.C.C.’s site were attached to fake e-mail addresses, which could indicate that they, too, were fake. After John Oliver told his viewers to submit their own comments to the F.C.C., the comment system crashed—not because of a surge in traffic, which has happened before, but because of a denial-of-service attack. The F.C.C. has not elaborated on the attack, nor has it provided additional details.

Rolling back Obama-era net-neutrality rules would dismantle prohibitions that prevent Internet service providers from charging companies for faster access or from slowing down or speeding up services like Netflix and YouTube. Under the updated rules, Internet providers would be asked to promise in writing not to slow down competitors’ traffic or block Web sites—a voluntary system that the F.C.C. would not actually enforce. Schneiderman noted in his letter that he is against such a policy but argued that the issue at hand has broader ramifications: “In an era where foreign governments have indisputably tried to use the internet and social media to influence our elections, federal and state governments should be working together to ensure that malevolent actors cannot subvert our administrative agencies’ decision-making processes.”