14 DAY TRIAL // The FCC opened its doors to commentators a few months back, following the reveal of the new set of proposed rules regarding the way the commission should handle net neutrality following a court decision stating that the FCC has no legal grounds to impose telcos to follow the rules.
The commission's proposals, however, were far from perfect and people, tech companies and advocates were quick to state their opinion on the topic. They were so adamant to get their point across that the FCC was flooded by comments and emails via a platform and email address they set up.
What was the result? Well, the FCC got over 1.1 million comments regarding the net neutrality debate. The number doesn’t even include the whole batch because direct mailed comments postmarked prior to July 18 are still being scanned and entered into the database, while additional handwritten comments may not be recognized by the optical character recognition software used by the Electronic Comment Filing System set up by the FCC.
The FCC has now made all of them available for people to see and to go through and get a feeling about what people want before the commission comes up with its own conclusions.
There are countless mentions of Comcast, Netflix, Verizon, free speech, and of course, net neutrality. There are thousands and thousands of comments in each document shared by the FCC and they’re pretty difficult to go through. Even with a pretty good computer, it’s nearly impossible to open the massive files without having your system freeze every other second.
Either way, people are asking the FCC to protect net neutrality, to not let ISPs create a fast lane that would only result in their speeds being slowed down and generally to avoid giving providers a hand in deciding what content they should watch and what content they should still get access to, but a much lower pace.
The FCC promises to review each and every comment as part of the official record of this proceeding.
“Because of the sheer number of comments and the great public interest in what they say, Chairman Wheeler has asked the FCC IT team to make the comments available to the public today in a series of six XML files, totaling over 1.4 GB of data – approximately two and half times the amount of plain-text data embodied in the Encyclopedia Britannica,” reads a note from Gigi Sohn, special counsel for External Affairs.
She explains that the release of the commons on the net neutrality topic should allow researchers, journalists and others to analyze and create visualizations of the data so that the public and the FCC can discuss and learn from the comments that the commission received.
“Our hope is that these analyses will contribute to an even more informed and useful reply comment period, which ends on September 10. We will make available additional XML files covering reply comments after that date,” Sohn writes.