As the debate for Net Neutrality continues to wage, with Internet service providers still expecting websites to pay more to have their content delivered to customers at faster speeds, a new analysis of the public comments made to the Federal Communications Commission on the issue shows that the agency either lost and/or ignored about 340,000 comments, Gizmodo reported.
Fight for the Future, a group who supports net neutrality, and the Sunlight Foundation both examined the comments and found some major discrepancies.
Fight for the Future’s Jeff Lyons said “at lest 244,811 [comments] were missing” from the FCC’s data, and the Sunlight Foundation found that 95,000 comments released by the FCC were duplicates.
“The Sunlight Foundation study concluded that anti-net neutrality comments dominated the dataset,” reported Gizmodo. “There was talk of a ‘shadowy’ Koch Brothers group that succeeded in driving half of the total number of comments, leading to the conclusion that some 60 percent of those who commented actually opposed net neutrality.”
This statistic then fueled the political rhetoric that most Americans opposed net neutrality, a fact that simply wasn’t true.
Regarding the missing comments, the FCC admitted to Lyons “that nearly a quarter of a million comments were indeed missing from the data it released.”
“As of right now, the failure point is still unclear: Did the FCC simply fail to export these comments, or did they actually fail to process them in the first place?” asked Lyons.
