LF: Two Separate Studies Show That The Vast Majority Of People Who Said They Support Ajit Pai's Plan... Were Fake (Net Neutrality)

Title: Two Separate Studies Show That The Vast Majority Of People Who Said They Support Ajit Pai's Plan... Were Fake (Net Neutrality)
Source: TechDirt
URL Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2 ... ajit-pais-plan-were-fake.shtml
Published: Dec 14, 2017
Author: Mike Masnick
Post Date: 2017-12-19 08:54:45 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 963
Comments: 24

from the fake-news dept

The fact that the FCC comments for Ajit Pai's net neutrality repeal were stuffed with fake comments is nothing new at all. We first reported on it back in May, and reports of comments from totally fake people or long dead people continue to pop up. Even worse are multiple stories of people having their own identities used to file comments, often opposed to their own views. The FCC has consistently responded that it doesn't care. New York's Attorney General has been investigating this as fraud, and asked the FCC to delay its net neutrality repeal until after the investigation was complete -- a request the FCC completely ignored. And, as we just noted a little while ago, Schneiderman recently announced that he's found over 2 million fake comments.

But it's easy to say "well, all these fake comments mean all the comments can be ignored." But it's important to look at the source of these fake comments and on which side they ended up. And just this week two new studies have come out, both taking a really deep dive into the fake comments. The Wall Street Journal did an investigation and reached out to 2,757 people who had supposedly commented. 72% of them said they had not posted the comments.

But even more thorough and more interesting is a new report that just came out this morning, from Startup Policy Lab's "Truth in Public Comments" project. Its methodology was even more thorough than the Wall Street Journal's. It took a random sample of 450,000 public commenters, and asked them "did you submit the comment quoted below to the FCC, yes or no?" The results are astounding:

88% of survey respondents whose emails were used to submit pro-repeal comments replied, “no,” that they did not submit the comment . Conversely, only 4% of pro-net neutrality respondents said that they did not submit the comment attributed to them.

Let's unpack that again to make it clear. Out of a fairly massive sample of FCC commenters nearly all of the ones supporting Pai's plan were fake. And nearly all of the ones supporting the existing rules were real. Here, see it in graphical form:

And this happened across multiple samples that the TiPC project ran. Each time, it showed that nearly all of the support for Pai's plan was fake. And nearly all the support for existing rules was real.

Also, quite telling: in sending out these emails asking people whether or not they filed, most of the responses they got came from people who supported net neutrality. The response rate among those who supported Pai? Tiny. Because most of them appear to be fake.

This is not to say that there weren't fake comments in support of the old rules. They did exist. But as the TiPC report notes, the "fakes" in support of the old rule were fairly obvious -- using obviously fake emails and names. The comments in support of Pai, while fake, used real emails and names that tried to appear real:

The FCC received spam comments that supported both the pro-net neutrality and pro-repeal. The difference, however, is that the majority of spam comments associated with email addresses supporting pro-net neutrality were ignored by the FCC because they were obviously fake. Conversely, we must conclude that the spam comments associated with email addresses that supported pro-repeal email addresses were a deliberate campaign to evade the eyes of regulators and influence the rulemaking process.
The discrepancy rests in the nature of the bounceback of emails. The survey resulted in a high bounce rate for emails associated with pro-net neutrality using unsophisticated approaches. Examples of an unsophisticated spam comment are those the FCC acknowledged are, “[o] bviously, fake comments [...] by the Flash, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Superman are not going to dramatically impact our deliberations on this issue. ”
By contrast, it appears that the spam comments for emails associated with pro-repeal comments reflect deliberate action to use stolen identities. In these instances, millions of Americans may have had their identity harvested for the political objectives of supporting the repeal of net neutrality laws, regardless of whether that individual agreed with the position or even had a position on the proposal. Accordingly, unlike the submission from Batman, which the FCC was correct to ignore, millions of Americans had their voice taken and repurposed without their consent.

No matter where you stand on the question of net neutrality, this should be a major concern. Public commenting is important, but when the system is totally hijacked in a way that appears designed to deliberately skew or merely taint the results, it does no one any good at all.

Just 2 big companies, Netflix and YouTube, are using 55% of total bandwidth. YouTube is an adjunct to Google's ad services and they are operating their own $35/month cable package for paying customers as well.

It seems that porn downloads and various torrent piracy apps comprise another 30% or so.

So why should the average corporate customer or home user who don't use all these video services pay for all the infrastructure being used to support Netflix and the other bandwidth hogs?

The answer is they shouldn't. If you want to use the network for delivery of your video entertainment instead of cable/satellite, why should everyone else be forced to subsidize your excessive consumption of data packets?

So it doesn't matter at all who commented or what the comments were. Net neutrality was a huge giveaway to the bandwidth hogs at the expense of everyone else. And it was contrary to the interests of a majority of internet users, used to justify continuing to raise access prices for everyone. Which hurt the poor and working class the most, as usual.

The only thing surprising is how unified the tech companies and many others were in protecting Netflix/YouTube from any examination of whether they should pay for their use of over half of all download traffic on the internet. And subsidizing the torrent pirates and the porn sites really isn't a freedom-of-access issue to most people.

All video services delivered via internet should be subject to common carrier fees to cover the costs of delivering those services to consumers. No free rides for Netflix/YouTube/Hulu/AmazonVideo/etc.

Video services via internet consume tens to hundreds of times more bandwidth than other internet services. Pricing should reflect that and those big users should pay commensurate carriage fees for access.

Only during primetime hours. But the way I read it, that is a percentage of downstream traffic, not a percentage of available downstream bandwidth.

If there are 100 cars on the road during primetime hours, 55 of them are Netflix and YouTube. But the road can handle more than 100 cars.

from the fake-news dept