Unique Comments to FCC Overwhelmingly Backed Net Neutrality Regulations, Study Says
Almost all unique net neutrality comments to the FCC favored retaining regulations from a 2015 order, said Ryan Singel, a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS). Attempting to filter out fake and form comments from…
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22 million submitted in a 2017 proceeding, he focused on "semantic outliers" and matched 646,041 unique comments to addresses in particular congressional districts. "A manual analysis of 1,000 of these comments showed that 99.7% of the comments opposed the repeal," said Singel's 44-page report Monday. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that nearly every single one of those comments that wasn’t written by a telecom lobbyist opposed the repeal," said Evan Greer, Fight for the Future deputy director. Noting the study's findings, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel tweeted that the FCC "rolled back the rules anyway. Washington is not listening to the American public. It’s not right -- and we need to keep up the fight." FCC spokespersons didn't comment Tuesday. CIS "is pretty much a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google, one of net neutrality’s largest supporters. So, the study is corporate PR," emailed Peter Flaherty, National Legal and Policy Center chairman: "The whole public comment process was hopelessly debased. I'm not sure what the Big Tech firms are now trying to prove. I think the Commissioners had enough input -- both fake and real -- to understand the arguments." Singel responded: "None of the work that CIS does on net neutrality is funded by corporate donations, and this study was not commissioned by anyone, let alone Google." CIS discloses that Google is one of several donors but "does not accept corporate funding for its network neutrality-related work." Singel says his funding comes from Stanford Law School, as disclosed here. "The report I released relies on a publicly available dataset which was analyzed with disclosed methods (including code) that make it easy for anyone to replicate the results or criticize its methodology," Singel emailed. "As a former journalist who once wrote an analysis piece for Wired called 'Why Google Became a Carrier-Humping Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey,' I find the accusation that my work is controlled by Google both hilarious and desperate." New York State's attorney general Tuesday vowed to investigate fake comments (see 1810160071).