The government just made it harder for you to weigh in on federal rules

For years, advocacy groups made it easy for Americans to weigh in on federal regulations. If a proposed rule threatened internet freedoms or environmental protections, organizations could set up simple campaign sites: type your comment, hit submit, and your feedback went straight into the federal record. During the 2017 net neutrality fight, more than 1.6 million comments reached the Federal Communications Commission in a single day.

That era just quietly ended.

As 404 Media first reported, the General Services Administration (GSA), which runs Regulations.gov, abruptly disabled the “Post” function on its public API (that is, the software gateway that lets outside applications talk directly to a government website). Until last week, groups could batch-submit comments collected on their ow