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

Bill gets a new hat!

[moniker_21]

Am I the only one that finds the AP photo just to the left of the article which pictures someone putting a hat on top of Bill Gates' head really hilarious? God it must be nice to be super rich. And here I am putting on my hat in the morning all by myself like a sucker......

That's it?

[mcrbids]

You mean, all the slashdot stories and everything, and we only got 15,000 responses?

Come on, guys, where is your activistic spirit?

Re:That's it?

[Brownstar]

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

We probably sent the 7,000 opinions..

Re:That's it?

[Flower]

With all the /. stories I expected to see a higher number of porn^H^H^H^Hgoatse.cx messages. But that's just me.

It's a sad state of affairs when even the trolls don't live up to their potential.

On a more serious note, what do you expect? /. can't even organize a boycott of DVDs. Hell, we even get frontpage stories about the latest anime DVDs to come out. You have a majority here that when you take an activist stand, like say voting for Nader, tell you you wasted your vote even when said critic admits to not voting at all.

Most of the /. crowd and even me to a shameful degree don't have an activist bone in their body. We're opinionated but not motivated and definately not inconvenienced enough to "get religion." The fact is we're too diverse of group to all congregate on any real issue. Having an interest in technology is simply not encompassing enough to organize this group.

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.

Numbers could be misleading...

[trcooper]

I wonder how many of the comments that were against the settlement were looking for a harsher settlement as opposed to the number of those thinking no action or less action should be taken. At first glance the numbers seem to indicate that twice as many people think there should have been harsher punishment, but the actual content of those comments could be different.

Washington Post Article

[craw]

Here are some snippets of the comments from some of the "big guns" who responded. This article was published last week.

Wow!

[jasno]

I didn't realize the Govt had to publish the comments!

So what happens if someone sent in the source to DeCss inside their email? Would they have had to publish it?

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.