14 DAY TRIAL // The FCC received over 1.1 million comments regarding the net neutrality issues and less than 1 percent were clearly opposed to net neutrality.
A while back, the Federal Communications Commission released to the public a partial database with 446,719 of the comments it received from the US population. The Sunlight Foundation released a new study that looked into thousands of comments submitted to the FCC and found that the vast majority favored net neutrality.
While the foundation didn’t actually go through the whole bunch to give exact numbers, statistics indicate that that less than 1 percent said that net neutrality wasn’t necessary or a good idea, basically stating that the Internet service providers should be allowed to control what type of content they access by speeding up some services and slowing down others.
About 60 percent of the comments submitted were form letters written by organized campaigns, while some 200 comments came from law firms on behalf of themselves or their clients.
It seems that about two thirds of commenters objected to the idea of the division of the Internet traffic into separate speed tiers, something that the FCC’s plans allowed.
There were also a large number of comments asking the FCC to forget about allowing service providers to create fast lanes, and to just reclassify ISPs as common carriers under the 1934 Communications Act. These comments included words such as “common carrier,” “(re)classify,” “authority” and “Title II.”
The subject of Internet access as an essential freedom came up in more than half the comments, while about the same amount of comments discuss the impact on small businesses and innovation that the Internet fast lanes would bring, as well as the end of actual net neutrality.
An estimated 40 percent of comments discussed the importance of consumer choice and the impact of regulations on consumer fees, while a third of the letters also mentioned how important competition among ISPs is.
The research says that about 15 percent of comments suggested that the FCC should treat broadband providers as a public utility.
For the sake of having some fun with this research, it should also be mentioned that some people who were leaving comments to the FCC following John Oliver’s famous net neutrality segment borrowed some of his wording. 1,500 comments that were directed at Tom Wheeler used the words “dingo,” for instance, while others mentioned Oliver by name.