Net Neutrality Comments to F.C.C. Overwhelmingly One-Sided, Study Says

WASHINGTON – More than 3.7 million comments poured into the Federal Communications Commission over the four months that it was seeking public input on its proposal for “Promoting and Protecting the Open Internet,” also known as net neutrality.

That demolished the previous record of 1.4 million comments – mostly complaints – that were filed after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the halftime performance at the Super Bowl in 2004.

As in that case, a large percentage of the net neutrality comments came in the guise of form letters – but a smaller proportion than might be expected.

A study by the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for government transparency, found that at least 60 percent of a set of 800,000 net neutrality comments released in bulk by the F.C.C. were form letters written by organized campaigns. The foundation said that was “actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets.”

In highly debated federal rule-making processes like those involving the Keystone pipeline or the Affordable Care Act, often more than 80 percent of comments come in form-letter format.

“Typically we see a rule-making dominated by a few organized letter-writing campaigns,” said Andrew Pendleton, who co-wrote the Sunlight study with Bob Lannon. “A lot of people in this instance wrote a comment for themselves,” he said, probably spurred by the debate’s seeping into mass media, as net neutrality did with a segment on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”

Over all, the comments studied were overwhelmingly one-sided. Less than 1 percent were clearly opposed to net neutrality. And about 5 percent had anti-regulation messages, although those included seemingly contradictory camps, one calling for consumer freedom and another advocating freedom for Internet service providers.

The F.C.C. data studied by the foundation was released on Aug. 5, two weeks after the initial deadline for comments. There was a second comment period, however, which ended Monday, and there is a good chance that a greater portion of anti-net-neutrality comments came in as organizers opposed to new regulations learned something from the efforts of their rivals.

There are, of course, gray areas in any such analysis. “It’s important to note,” the authors said, that while 1 percent of the input was clearly opposed to net neutrality, “the remaining 99 percent of comments include both comments supporting net neutrality and comments with no clear position on net neutrality, such as the full text of ‘War and Peace.’ ”