The people involved should go to prison. This is no less of an offense than corruption by judges, or other public official. It may be one step removed, but if you don't make an example out of companies and the people involved, this will keep happening as a tacit agreement that its ok, and it isn't.
Yeah, in any other context where it's beneficial to the government, wouldn't this be treated as a Very Serious "conspiracy to defraud the United States" charge, if not also false statements and fraud of all kinds?
I suppose this -was- a state attorney's investigation, so kudos to the AG for doing what she can in her limited role - pretty sure she couldn't bring criminal charges even if she wanted to here (NY AG can only prosecute a limited range of crimes to my recollection, with punishments tending towards fines). But where is the federal government? Has there been any word from them? Genuinely curious. But not optimistic.
The Federal government (at the time) was siding with the sock puppets and was aided by them in their goals of killing net neutrality, so of course there was no investigation.
"Respondents were responsible for the submission of at least 2.4 million fake public comments to the government. These public comments ran across multiple official proceedings on a range of policy issues, purportedly signed by individuals who in fact had neither approved or even been shown the messages sent using their identities, nor been told any such messages would be sent on their behalf."
Note that this predates LLMs; 2.4M fake comments must have been laborous to write.
