WASHINGTON — The Federal Communication Commission is under some bipartisan pressure to prevent false entries and stolen identities from mucking up the public comment process, an effort driven by problems with the network neutrality docket.

That came from two senators with some skin in the game, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). Both of their identities were stolen to file false comments in that FCC docket.

The FCC has been under pressure to ferret out bogus comments, given that as many as 2 million bot-generated or otherwise inauthentic comments were filed in that proceeding, representing by far the most comments, real and fake, for any FCC action.

FCC chair Ajit Pai has said the agency is working to address those issues while still trying to make the process as open as possible. He signaled after the fake comments were identified that erring on the side of inclusion could mean some bad apples wind up in the bunch, as it were.

But the senators had some suggestions for tightening up that process, including using CAPTCHA technology (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to battle the bots. The technology uses those boxes with numbers and letters to retype so a computer can tell whether the user is not another computer.

The senators also want the FCC to publicize just how many fake comments were filed in the docket. There have been some complaints that the distorted letters and numbers are hard to identify, which could discourage use of the system.

A large portion of the public comments filed in the Federal Communications Commission’s network-neutrality docket came from “fake” email domains created by email generator programs, according to the National Legal and Policy Center, which said it has accumulated six CSV files with 1.5 million examples.

The NLPC said its analysis shows that between July 17 and Aug. 4, 5.8 million such “fake” comments were posted in the FCC docket, which had 18.5 million total comments at press time.

The group said the false domains came from a U.S. email generator program at fakemailgenerator.com and include armyspy.com, cuvox.de, dayrep.com, einrot.com, fleckens.hu, gustr.com, jourrapide.com, rhyta.com, superrito.com and teleworm.us.

The net-neutrality docket has been almost as controversial as FCC chair Ajit Pai’s proposal to roll back Title II regulations and review the 2015 Open Internet order’s rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization.

The FCC has said the comments system suffered a distributed-denial-of-service attack connected with John Oliver’s May 7 call on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, for viewers to flood it with comments in support of Title II. Net-neutrality activists have challenged the FCC’s claim, and Hill Democrats have said it needs investigating.

The FCC is also facing lawsuits for not providing more information on the alleged DDoS attacks, which were cited by its CIO, David Bray, in a May 8 statement following the airing.

“Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks,” Bray said. “These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”

Just last week, website Gizmodo posted a story questioning the DDoS claims and citing a former FCC security official saying there had been no DDoS attack in 2014, when Oliver made a similar on-air all for Title II and the FCC similarly cited an attack.

Gizmodo has previously said the FCC, in response to an FOIA request, conceded it did not have analysis to support the May assertion of a DDoS attack, though Pai spokesman Brian Hart has said that report was “categorically false.”

Pai has said the FCC will err on the side of transparency, taking the bogus with the bona fide. In either case, the deadline for comments is Aug. 30. The FCC will continue to accept comments past that date, but does not have to factor them into its decision.