Group Says Most Comments Support Net Neutrality Repeal; Fight for the Future Skeptical

analyzed the 4.99 million comments filed in docket 17-108 by June 20 (more than 5 million were filed as of Monday). "Roughly 65% of the docket is in support of repeal of the 2015 rule," it said. "Nearly 6% of comments filed are coming from self-identified international filers, and approximately 75% of all comments are from letter campaigns coming from both sides -- for and against repeal." Commenters' "sentiment was determined based on the clear language indicated in the form letters we tracked on both sides of the debate, which comprise the majority of the docket. We also used key terms indicating support for or against the current Title II-based rules," CASE said. A spokeswoman for a group drumming up support for the 2015 net neutrality order voiced skepticism, "given the utter lack of real grassroots support for [FCC Chairman] Ajit Pai's plan to dismantle net neutrality protections," though she acknowledged she would have to dig into CASE's methodology. "Given that the FCC has refused to do anything about the hundreds of thousands of fake anti-net neutrality comments that were submitted to their API [application programming interface] using real people's stolen names and addresses, this sentiment analysis is essentially moot, because it's including comments that the FCC (and everyone else) knows were not submitted by real people," emailed Evan Greer, Fight for the Future campaign director. "A valid sentiment analysis would take that into consideration and would work to separate out the comments that are known to be fake. It does not appear that CASE has done that, which means they are making claims based on data that they know to be tainted."