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99.7 Percent of Unique FCC Comments Favored Net Neutrality, Independent Analysis Finds (vice.com)

When a Stanford researcher removed all the duplicate and fake comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission last year, he found that 99.7 percent of public comments -- about 800,000 in all -- were pro-net neutrality. From a report: "With the fog of fraud and spam lifted from the comment corpus, lawmakers and their staff, journalists, interested citizens and policymakers can use these reports to better understand what Americans actually said about the repeal of net neutrality protections and why 800,000 Americans went further than just signing a petition for a redress of grievances by actually putting their concerns in their own words," Ryan Singel, a media and strategy fellow at Stanford University, wrote in a blog post Monday. Singel released a report [PDF] Monday that analyzed the unique comments -- as in, they weren't a copypasta of one or dozens of other letters -- filed last year ahead of the FCC's decision to repeal federal net neutrality protections. That's from the 22 million total comments filed, meaning that more than 21 million comments were fake, bots, or organized campaigns.

2 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Public Comments are not... by bobbied · · Score: 2, Informative

    A way to vote for something you want or don't want.

    The number of comments entered into the system has zero impact on the decision. Nobody at the FCC is counting them, nor should they. This isn't some official opinion poll being conducted here.

    The PURPOSE of the public comments at the FCC is to obtain INFORMATION from the public that the FCC may not already have. So unless you are providing a unique prospective or some unique facts about the question being considered that you entered some unique comment into the system your opinion of the question doesn't mean anything. If you are just voicing an opinion in your comment, figure it gets round filed and you just wasted your time and the time of the poor slob at the FCC who's job it is to read and classify all these comments.

    I'm sorry if you don't like this, but that's how the FCC works (actually not just the FCC, but other government "public comment" processes too). Most government processes don't care about doing opinion polls, that's the role of the political appointees anyway. So if you didn't like this result, or if you did, you need to vote accordingly.

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    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  2. rates are set by the local gov... by ole_timer · · Score: 2, Informative

    net neutrality had nothing to do with what an isp charges you, it said isp's could not charge netflix more for using up all the bandwidth. rates charged you are set by the local government who signs an exclusive contract with the local isp. doh.https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/10/15/2024241/997-percent-of-unique-fcc-comments-favored-net-neutrality-independent-analysis-finds#

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    nothing to see here - move along