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While the Federal Communications Commission was preparing to repeal the laws of internet neutrality last year, there remained 22 million comments on its website, voicing arguments for or against keeping the Internet open protected and in place. A new report indicates that 99.7% of the unique comments left on the agency's website were favorable to net neutrality.
"Filtering the Robots: What the Americans Really Said to the FCC Regarding the Repeal of Internet Neutrality" is a study by Ryan Singel, Media and Strategy Researcher at the Center for the internet and the society of Stanford Law School. State, district by district, review the language-unique comments returned to the FCC during the 2017 repeal process. "
In an article published Monday on the blog, Singel wrote that he relied heavily on the work done previously by scientist Jeff Kao. Kao took the 22 million comments and extracted those that were not letters or products of fraud campaigns. He found himself with 800,000 comments identified as "semantic out of competition". Of these comments, 99.7% were in favor of maintaining the Net Neutrality rules put in place in 2015.
Singel took into account Kao's 800,000 comments and classified them by geographical area, including the 50 states and each congressional district.
"In total, 646,041 unique comments were matched to congressional districts. The resulting reports for each district provide a way to explore citizens 'concerns and show the extent and diversity of citizens' concerns about the FCC, stating that it would only guarantee Americans can choose the sites, applications and services that they use, without interference from the companies for which they pay to connect, writes Singel.
His report revealed that these unique commentators understood what is the neutrality of the internet and were able to clearly express their reasoning for wanting to keep it in place. This includes rural Americans, who have also expressed concern about not having a lot of options regarding Internet providers.
In addition, the number of comments from congressional districts with highly contested races was above average. Democrats and Republicans were in favor of net neutrality.
The report makes it clear that not all non-unique comments addressed to the FCC were considered to be forgeries, as many commentators used standard letters found on websites advocating for the cause.
"However, because of the amount of noise generated by the false comments, it remains very difficult to locate the real signals in the non-unique comments," the report says.
The Singel report can be downloaded in pdf format here. It includes links to the results of each state and congressional district.
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