Home News More than 22 Million Comments received by Net Neutrality

More than 22 Million Comments received by Net Neutrality

by Harikrishna Mekala

According to an FCC expert talking on background late Friday.

By late Sunday, the total views, including those registered by the deadline, had shifted past 22 million to 22,146,888.

The FCC will proceed to assemble and post those remarks, but only those filed before Aug. 30 are part of the standard record the committee has to think as it makes the choice on whether to roll back Title II group of internet access providers and review the rules against charging, throttling, and paid prioritization.

In that Restoring Internet Freedom plan, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is also offering to scrap the usual conduct standard, which the former chairman, Tom Wheeler, said was needed so that the FCC could deal on a case-by-case basis with possible obstacles to net neutrality.

Many of the remarks were registered with clearly bogus names. Among the more prominent cases of name theft: journalist and net neutrality advocate Karl Bode’s name was used without his permission for a comment supporting a roll back of the rules. FCC chair Ajit Pai’s sign was used on hundreds of remarks opposing his plan, some threatening him with death or using racial slurs. John Oliver’s name was practiced on more than 2,000 of remarks as well. On a case by case basis, these copies are easy enough to spot. But in aggregate, they’re performing it harder to draw inferences about the overall public view of the proceeding.

Starting in May, the FCC’s position was also hit with what seemed to be a spambot offering hundreds of thousands of anti-Title II observations with the exact same boilerplate language. News published at the time that many of the individuals whose private information was found in the spambot remarks demanded that their identities were used without their consent. What’s more, a study by former Airbnb data scientist Jeffrey Fossett determined that 75.6 percent of a random example of the boilerplate comments received names and addresses also found in known spam databases.

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