The Data From Comments to the FCC About Net Neutrality

[sagichmal]

I'm confused. The article claims

    "“net neutrality,” allows internet service providers 
    (ISPs) to discriminate between different types of internet 
    traffic (a “fast lane” for video and social media, for 
    example) in an attempt to help further competition and 
    promote innovation"

and in so doing appears to conflate the FCC's new rule proposals with the abstract principle of net neutrality, which the rules would explicitly contravene.

Is some clarification possible here?

[minimaxir]

I took that directly from the first paragraph on the FCC's Open Internet brief: http://www.fcc.gov/openinternet

[evanb]

It seems as though the author has mixed up pro- and anti-net neutrality (or rather, the meaning of net neutrality itself). Otherwise, the data analysis is pretty nice (though some of the maps seem to be falling to the https://xkcd.com/1138/ mistake).

[minimaxir]

The first one does the population mistake, which I acknowledge. (but is necessary for context)

The other maps are normalized by % of comments sent, which mitigates the population impact.

[kfcm]

This can't be right:

   "Looking at the data behind these comments, it’s 
   clear to see that the entire country is passionate 
   against net neutrality."

So the entire country wants "pay lanes" and "pay-per-site-access"?

[minimaxir]

Fixed.

This is a reminder why I should never blog while sleep deprived.

[ChrisAntaki]

> That means over about ¼th of the comments in the dataset, and atleast 1/10th of all comments submitted, used this website’s submission form.

Nice write up, minimaxir. I was lucky enough to be involved with Battle for the Net. We ended up successfully submitting ~135 thousand comments to the FCC.

I highly recommend people reach out to their favorite nonprofits. The projects are really fun.

[ChrisAntaki]

Note: 136,398 successful sends and counting. People are still sending in comments, which rocks. Unfortunately, there were additional comments which couldn't be sent. Part of the reason being the FCC form doesn't allow military zip codes, or certain valid emails.

[minimaxir]

Wait, I submitted this yesterday and now it's on the front page of Hacker News?

The Hacker News ranking system always surprises me.

[dang]

We're experimenting with ways to salvage posts that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8134682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8122403

[mafuyu]

Identical link submissions count as votes for the original post instead. It's likely that as your post gained traction elsewhere, other users submitted the same link to HN.