FCC Receives 22 million Comments on Net Neutrality

Nearly 22 million comments were filed with the U.S. government on Net Neutrality, a massive display of direct democracy that's been dogged by charges of faked submissions and the possibility that results were decided months ago. Yesterday, 8/30 was the final day consumers could voice their opinion to the Federal Communications Commission on the changes to Net Neutrality rules, which the current chairman has said he wanted to nix. The rules were put into effect during the Obama administration in 2015 to prevent Internet providers from adjusting the speeds of big-time users, say by charging more for Netflix and Hulu or slowing them down.

But under the Trump presidency, the current FCC chairman has sought to abolish the rules, which he says stymie investment by telecom providers.Egged on by advocates like HBO's John Oliver, Internet users have been urged to speak to the FCC by submitting a comment, adding consumer voices to the more regular lobbying efforts of big Net Neutrality advocates Amazon and Netflix. Large Internet Service Providers such as AT&T and Comcast have advocated for the rules' repeal. The process has been muddied by both sides' complaints that fake comments were submitted. Researcher Emprata studied the comments on behalf of the telecom industry, and said 60% were against repeal. But it also gave a detailed analysis of what seems to have been generated by faked, multiple, or form submissions. For instance, it 7 million of the comments came from temporary (fake) e-mail addresses. Among the sliver of comments that were unique, non-form letters, more (1.77 million) were against the repeal than for the repeal (24,000), the study found.