While its figurehead spent the short week finding innovative new ways to pick his favorite type of Twitter fight, the Trump administration announced a vote on a proposal that would functionally end net neutrality, as that concept is embodied in Obama-era rules that prohibit Internet service providers from blocking, throttling, or favoring the dissemination of certain types of content. Ajit Pai, who Trump appointed earlier this year as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, promised that his "light-touch regulatory approach" would bring a long-awaited end to what he called the federal government's "micromanaging" of the Internet. Of the FCC's five commissioners, three are Republicans, all but assuring that the proposal will pass on a party-line vote in December. That famed populist dream of restoring consumers' right to have private companies interfere with their access to information, it seems, has finally come to pass.

Like all proposed rules, the administration's proposal was subject to a mandatory public comment period. And as noted by TechCrunch, conspicuously omitted from Chairman Pai's statement was the fact that the FCC received more than 22 million comments on the subject, an unprecedented number that forced the agency to update its information systems and extend the comment submission deadline because of the sheer volume of feedback it received. And while most of those comments, according to the analytics firm Gravwell, expressed support for the proposed rule changes, only 17.4 percent of them appear to have been authored by real people. Those comments—the ones that do not appear to be the work of the diligent bots that have played such an outsized role in American politics of late—are vociferously and overwhelmingly opposed to the changes.

This alarming pattern did not go unnoticed by law enforcement. On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman revealed that he had opened an investigation into what he called a "massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process" that had attempted to negate the views of "the real people, businesses, and others who honestly commented on this important issue." Over the last five months, his office repeatedly reached out to the FCC requesting information and assistance. Chairman Pai, he says, ignored him every time. While Schneiderman admits that he supports net neutrality, he says, "this isn't about that."

It’s about the right to control one’s own identity and prevent the corruption of a process designed to solicit the opinion of real people and institutions. Misuse of identity online by the hundreds of thousands should concern everyone — for and against net neutrality, New Yorker or Texan, Democrat or Republican.

In sum, we have the impending enactment of what might charitably be referred to as a wildly controversial policy that could fundamentally change how hundreds of millions of Americans are able to access the Internet; a public comment period that appears to have been subject to rampant abuse; and a federal government that has elected to respond by shutting its eyes, covering its ears, and pretending that none of this information exists.

This probably isn't attributable to Trump himself, who does not seem to possess a nuanced understanding of the net neutrality debate. In 2014, he parroted the right-wing talking point that compared net neutrality unfavorably to the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine, but has otherwise said little on the subject. It seems far likelier that his opposition, such as it is, is based more on that pathological need to oppose whatever President Obama supports than on any sincerely-held belief.