According to a piece on npr, "The Federal Communications Commission received more than 1 million (1,067,779) public comments on the issue of net neutrality during a five-month commenting period that ended Friday.

It's the biggest public response the FCC has ever gotten on a policy matter in such a short period, and the second most commented-upon FCC issue, period.

The proposal would allow cable companies to charge content providers extra fees to deliver faster service.

...But there's one problem, according to George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce.

..."The vast majority of the comments are utterly worthless," Pierce says. "This has been studied quite a bit by some very good academics," he says. And the studies show that rule-making or policymaking tends to be systemically biased to favor the industries that are affected by the regulation.

"(In a study of banking reform, they found that) while proponents of strict regulation of financial institutions dominated the comment process numerically, their comments were useless to decision makers, because the vast majority of them were identical form letters without data or analysis.

...The folks who do comment with the detail, data and analysis that can change minds? Deep-pocketed industries.

"Those comments that have some potential to influence are the very lengthy, very well-tailored comments that include a lot of discussion of legal issues, a lot of discussion of policy issues, lots of data, lots of analysis," Pierce says. "Those are submitted exclusively by firms that have a large amount of money at stake in the rule-making and the lawyers and trade associations that are represented by those firms.""

You can read the full article at npr.org.

Deb Gaber