Feds to Publish Public Comments on MS Settlement

Silas writes: "This AP Article notes that the government is going to be releasing the comments submitted by the public on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Highlight: 'Overall, the department said it received about 7,500 comments from people in favor of the settlement reached by the federal government and nine states, while 15,000 opposed it. Another 7,000 comments were dismissed as opinion, like "I hate Microsoft."' Apparently they have to publish and respond to each one." CNN is carrying the AP wire story as well.

Comments

Re:That's it?

[Caball]

My guess is that the majority of happy/satisfied (they do exist, you know) Microsoft/Windows users didn't bother to write, while all of the angry linux zealots fired off diatribes.

Re:That's it?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least 22,000 would be a better guess... After all, 7,000 were eliminated for being of the form 'I hate Microsoft', plust that leaves some extras (more than 30,000) of which some were both pro and anti Microsoft form letters

(How long before the inevitably, unfunny, but modded up jokes about Microsoft making employees write those form letters, or jsut the letters in general come along?)

Re:That's it?

[Brownstar]

In all likely hood the 15,000 weren't from slashdot.

We probably sent the 7,000 opinions..

Re:Inquiring minds would like to know...

[GreyPoopon]

Excellent question. I did note that either in the attached article or one I read earlier today, they stated that responses from a FORM letter, as provided by both Microsoft advocates and opponents were considered not applicable. This would then indicate that the 15,000 responses only contained individual opinions. What might be more interesting is to find out how many of the pro-Settlement comments came from Microsoft employees or others with key relationships to Microsoft, and how many of the anti-Settlement comments came from people with relationships to heavy Microsoft competitors.

I think the process that they used to weed out the "useless" content clearly indicates that they are not in the slightest concerned with majority opinion, but are more interested in the actual content of opinions. Of course, it's also possible that it's just a formality. Hopefully the fact that 2/3 of the opinions are dissenting will make them think a bit.

Spam and Porn

[Ami Ganguli]

More than a thousand messages were completely off topic. Some of those were advertisements - known as ``spam,'' - and at least one e-mail contained pornography.

The first thing I thought when I read this: I bet some bastard sent in the goat sex link. Evil.

Does this mean the government has to publish the porn and the spam in the register along with the legitimate comments?

Thank god it was only 15,000!

[sterno]

Given that when they actually dug into the responses, less than 50 were really well researched and made significant points about the case. I mean talk about signal to noise ratios.

Re:That's it?

[jafac]

For the record:
I wrote a 4 page letter expressing my view on the Microsoft case, (I did use the phrase "Microsoft sucks" followed by "the life out of the computer industry"). I did not use a template, or fire off a quick one liner.

I wrote my senators about the case.
I wrote my senators about the DeCSS case.
I wrote them about the passage of the DMCA.

SHAME on anyone here who has ever had to reinstall Windows just because "the registry got messed up" - and did not voice their opinion on this case. Shame on you.

Re:Inquiring minds would like to know...

[iCharles]

I think the process that they used to weed out the "useless" content clearly indicates that they are not in the slightest concerned with majority opinion, but are more interested in the actual content of opinions.

You say that like it's a bad thing!

Keep this in mind: do you give more weight to posts that contain an thoughtful arguement, or to a bunch of "me too" posts?

Also, I think you are confusing a legal determination from an election. The latter is a case where noone cares why someone favors one side or another, simply how many favorred a given side.

The legal detemriantion, however, looks to see why it is felt an action would be in violation of laws on the books, what the impact would be on affected groups (in this case, consumers, etc.). Quality over quantity matters.

The Mass listening problem

[Zeinfeld]

Dealling with the responses is an exercise in what we called at the MIT AI lab 'mass listening'. It is very hard to correlate that volume of response in a usefull fashion. But it is done every week for the President and on a smaller scale each member of congress.

I am not surprised at the breakdown of the messages, except that the number of messages rejected as 'opinion' (7,000) sounds rather low if anything. The number of form letters (3,000)also sounds like it on the low side.

I doubt that anyone in the administrationis going to treat the messages as 'votes' [what start a lawsuit to stop them being counted? - Ed]. The number of messages on both sides will have been inflated by 'astroturf' (fake grass roots) campaigns by Microsoft, Sun, AOL etc. Fortunately messages of that type tend to be easier to spot than the people who purchase the campaigns think.

The bulk of the messages will simply repeat each other and standard positions fed to people by the media (including slashdot). I suspect that the 48 'substantive' comments are mainly the briefs written by industry lawyers to support one party or another. I strongly suspect however that it is the case that practically every idea expressed in the 22,000 contributions is covered in the 48 'substantive' contributions. Identifying a small number of contributions that put all the important issues well is a tremendous service to people trying to read the materials.

Taking the feedback as email will have helped sorting to an enormous degree. But a structured forum with some form of moderation could have helped the feedback further, collapsing repetative positions down to one instance and such. The moderation need not have been on the slashdot model in which there is a single pool of moderators, there could be twin panels of moderators representing each side. After all posting troll comments and pornography would do nothing for either side unless they wanted to discredit the dabate.

Finally the cost of publication at $400 a page does not seem unreasonable, it is roughly equivalent to the cost of printing and distributing about 1,000 copies. That is not much more than one per senator, congressman, state AG, party affected and news organization.

Polls and Opinions and the Tunney Act

[gdyas]

The law in this case requires the collection and publication of opinions. The judge can do with these opinions whatever she wishes, including disregard them completely.

So, don't get your panties in a twist.

Re:Damn Republicans...

[maddman75]

Don't be so quick to assume that all republicans want to make love to Billy G. Even Rush Limbaugh has spoken out against Microsoft, during one show referring to Bill Gates as a "monopolist, threat to national security, and a thief."

Pro business doesn't mean evil, nor does it mean supporting a criminal business.

Re:Inquiring minds would like to know...

[GreyPoopon]

You say that like it's a bad thing!

I agree with you. I didn't mean to say it that way, but that's how it came out. I think the purpose was to examine the content all along, but I believe there are a lot of disappointed petition signers out there who would have taken the time and thought to submit their own opinions if they had realized how the information was to be handled. Also, my guess is that these rules are clearly spelled out somewhere, but nobody bothered to check.

Spam filter explained, etc

[os2fan]

I find the spam somewhat worryingly high, rather than low. Since the filter is the subject line must contain "Microsoft Settlement" or something, this means that over 1000 spam messages had been modified to include this in the title. This is disturbing.

The subject "Hose your grandmother's account" would be filtered out because it does not contain the required subject header.

Of those who said "I hate Microsoft" or "Linux Rulz", these give no constructive comment on either the settlement's comments or what has been excluded. Simply saying "I hate (some company)" may be an ethical statement that you hate them because they sell a product you hate, and is no indication that they are break the law. eg, "I hate Ford", because they sell cars, and I hate cars. This is not a reflection on Ford's business practices.

My comment largely centered on possible antitrust comments in upgrades. For example, there is nothing stopping MS from doing things in "required" upgrades, such as shutting down competitive dual boots [Win2k], applications, &c. Upgrades and retail versions should be subject to the same technical restrictions as OEM versions viz Abiltity to not install assorted middleware, honouring multi-boots, etc.