The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University released a new study yesterday examining the 24 million comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding net neutrality between April and August of 2017. In April, the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking comment on a proposal to repeal the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. In the months that followed, the FCC was deluged with comments and Commissioner Ajit Pai eventually claimed that the FCC’s system was brought down by a Denial of Service Attack–a claim that was later proved false by the FCC’s Inspector General. More than 22 million comments were submitted to the FCC; however, the report focuses on more than 800,000 “unique comments,” which the report defines as “non-form letter comments.” The report found that 99.7 percent of unique comments were in favor of net neutrality. The report was also able to match 646,041 unique comments to Congressional districts. The FCC has yet to respond to the report’s findings.
