No, the FCC Didn't Lose Your Net Neutrality Comment

An alarming Reddit post popped up last night that suggested the Federal Communications Commission lost hundreds of thousands of comments weighing in on the importance of maintaining net neutrality. Rest assured—the FCC says the comments haven't gone anywhere, and are still being catalogued.

That post, called "I'm calling shenanigans—FCC Comments for Net Neutrality drop from 700,000 to 200,000," suggested that someone either deleted hundreds of thousands of comments from the FCC's website or that some sort of backend server error had resulted in the loss of those comments. Numerous people suggested that their comment had never shown up online.

It's definitely not a good look that the FCC's comment page has gone down numerous times throughout the 90 day comment period on the agency's new proposed net neutrality rules, and it's not a good look that it went down today, during the comment period's originally-scheduled deadline. But the FCC told Motherboard that all comments have been logged, and nothing was lost.

"Comments are reviewed as they come in and afterwards by staff across several bureaus," Mark Wigfield, an FCC spokesperson, told me. "No comments have been lost."

The FCC tells me that, at last count, it had received more than 780,000 comments, and all of them have been saved.

Meanwhile, the comments themselves aren't going anywhere. While roughly 200,000 people have submitted their comments through the agency's website, the vast majority have emailed the FCC their comments instead (perhaps because of the site's inconsistent reliability). More than 442,000 people emailed their comments to the FCC instead of using the agency's website, according to data the group published yesterday.

Those comments are being batch uploaded periodically onto the website by FCC employees, Wigfield told me. That's why it both looks like there are fewer comments than there actually are and explains why some people believe their comments were never counted.

Numerous emails are being lumped together in each "comment" uploaded this way to the agency's Electronic Comment Filing System, so it appears as if there are fewer comments than there actually are.

"The comments filed into inbox are being transferred to ECFS in batches, and may not appear immediately," Wigfield said. "But they will all be included and read."

The FCC says it has had an overwhelming response to the proposed rules, which would create a tiered internet, allowing internet service providers to create a "fast lane" that prioritizes certain types of traffic. As you'd expect, most of the comments came at the beginning of the comment period and after major "events" in this saga, such as popular Reddit posts and, most notably, after John Oliver pled for more comments in a segment on his show that went viral.

"The FCC IT team rapidly implemented an additional caching feature on June 3 to support some of the highest concurrent commenting levels that ECFS has seen in its 17-plus year history," the David Bray, the FCC's chief information officer, wrote in a blog post published yesterday. "The number of people submitting comments is impressive, underscoring the importance of this issue and the critical role public engagement plays in the Commission’s policy-making process. When the ECFS system was created in 1996, the Commission presumably didn’t imagine it would receive more than 100,000 electronic comments on a single telecommunications issue."

The agency says it'll read every comment—though it's certainly too early to tell whether it's going to make any difference in the end.