The great majority of individuals who signed unique comments to the Federal Communications Commission require the FCC to keep its current net neutrality rules and order of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, according to the study published today.
The study was led by consulting firm Emprata and supported by Broadband for America, whose members cover AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter, CTIA-The Wireless Association, Comcast, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and USTelecom.
Unique remarks support current rules
When Emprata examined all 21.8 million remarks, including spam and form letters, 60 percent were against FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to repeal the Title II classification, and 39 percent approved the repeal plan. But the figures shifted starkly in favor of having the Title II rules when eliminating duplicates in order to examine just unique remarks written by people.
Emprata wrote:
There are considerably extra “personalized” comments appearing only once in the docket opposite repeal (1.52 million) versus 23,000 for repeal. Probably, these remarks originated from people that took the time to type a personalized commentary. Although these remarks represent less than 10 percent of the total, this is a distinguished difference.
That amounts to 98.5 percent of personalized remarks supporting the current rules.
Form letters aggregate the majority of observations on both sides. This was particularly pronounced in the case of anti-Title II comments:
The strong majority of commentaries for and against repealing Title II are form letters pre-generated portions of text that look multiple points in the docket. The form words likely originated from various sources made by groups that were for or against the repeal of Title II. Form messages contain upwards of 89.8 percent of comments against Title II cancellation and upwards of 99.6 percent of the remarks for Title II repeal.
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