More Than 80 Percent of All Net Neutrality Comments Were Sent By Bots, Researchers Say (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Trump administration and its embattled FCC commissioner are on a mission to roll back the pro-net neutrality rules approved during the Obama years, despite the fact that most Americans support those safeguards. But there is a large number of entities that do not: telecom companies, their lobbyists, and hordes of bots. Of all the more than 22 million comments submitted to the FCC website and through the agency's API found that only 3,863,929 comments were "unique," according to a new analysis by Gravwell, a data analytics company. The rest? A bunch of copy-pasted comments, most of them likely by automated astroturfing bots, almost all of them -- curiously -- against net neutrality. "Using our (admittedly) simple classification, over 95 percent of the organic comments are in favor of Title II regulation," Corey Thuen, the founder of Gravwell, told Motherboard in an email.

Comments

Ajit Pai and Donald Trump are both traitors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of em.

Thanks captn obvious

[burtosis]

Who the hell would be against net neutrality except a few straggling brainwashed fools who would have a different opinion if they only knew what was real? Yes sign me up for vastly increased monthly payments, squish small businesses and startups, micro payments on everything net related, separate fees to access different sites, suppress competing services and views not held by big ISPs, and hell yes please make internet access whitelist sites only for my own protection and those of DRM!!1!!!1!

Re:Thanks captn obvious

[swb]

The problem with your scenario is that it presents a false choice by framing ISP monopolies only existing because of government approval. That may be true for cable television franchises specifically, but not internet access.

The reality is that utilities are fairly close to a natural monopoly because of the complex infrastructure required. We lack competition not because of government granted monopolies, but because duplicating infrastructure is expensive and the economics of it are poor (essentially your are splitting a fixed market against an entrenched competitor).

What we need is for the government to acknowledge the existing monopoly status and impose a means of regulation that limits exploitation of the monopoly that already exists, and probably further, does something to eliminate the ability of a monopoly to exist (ie, a municipal fiber network with equal access at the head end).

This isn't voting.

[volkris]

Slashdot needs to give its readers more context in these posts about regulation feedback. Specifically, it needs to emphasize that in the US regulatory process, this comment phase is not voting. The numbers don't really enter into it.

The regulator has to address issues raised in comments, but that's about counting issues, not comments. An issue with one comment is to be addressed just as an issue brought up by a thousand comments.

The FCC is subject to the laws our representatives pass. THAT's where we give the marching orders. This regulatory process is only about seeing to it that the commission implements the laws handed to it.

Re:This isn't voting.

[dunkindave]

Oh you poor naive fool.

Congress deliberately passes broad sweeping laws that leave a lot of discretion for the enacting agencies since Congress can't be bothered by the minutia. In this case it is the FCC that put the current Net-Neutrality provisions in place, not Congress, and the FCC can take them away. The comments aren't a vote, but they will certainly be used by the politicians to justify their actions - "Look, we were doing what the public demanded. 90% of those commenting were against Net Neutrality, so we did what they public wanted us to do."