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posted by martyb on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the say-it-often-enough-and-people-will-tend-to-believe-you dept.

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.

NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans' identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the "organic" public submissions.

The author's key findings:

  1. One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
  2. There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
  3. It's highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:02AM (#604539)

    I agree to a limited extent, in that the prolific "unlimited Internet" which are of course not unlimited are fraudulent. Tiered plans with burst and extra fees beyond the specifically-defined data limits are of course possible to do, and can be reasonably priced since the servers I'm paying for in a remote data center are doing exactly that right now.

    The "third party content producer" is just obfuscation for "streaming video site", and the massive traffic imbalance that brings ALSO impacts no-fee peering agreements in addition to the problem with fraudulent ISP access plans you identified. The access costs for such streaming video sites would be/are much higher if they were paying for the data they actually used instead of shopping around for backbone providers with peering agreements they could have the backbone provider violate for a while which is why there was big news a couple years ago regarding Cogent's peering agreements being revoked by some ISPs - it was due to the violation of such peering agreements due to the massive traffic imbalance caused by your "third party content producers" aka streaming video.