There's an even better breakdown here that has graphs showing the submission times of the comments. There is suddenly 15 thousand identical comments submitted in 1 minute before "turning off" the next minute.
There are 345085 "unprecedented" comments and 13744 "outraged" comments in the first million comments.
Only 127 of those comments use emails that are lowercase. Over 300k of those comments have emails typed in ALL CAPS.
Every single one of those comments are exactly the same (ergo copy pasted). This means there's some form of automation. It's NOT people copy pasting manually however because nobody types their email in all caps. 300k people do not do that.
Websites will normally capitalize the email address, since they are case insensitive, when it's saved into the database. When something is case insensitive, you compare the capitilized version of both.
Eg: Is 'Abc'.toUpperCase() == 'AbC'.toUpperCase().
So this means either:
1. A bot is submitting for other people without their permission, using a hacked database(s).
2. A bot is submitting for other people on the behalf of a very large anti-net neutrality community (which I've never heard of).
3. People are clicking links in an email that presents a form with their data already filled out, which they manually submit (requires a large anti-net neutrality community).
4. There's a form on another website which people are filling out, that is using javascript to capitalize the emails before submitting it to the FCC's website.
The first case is much more likely than the other cases.
And the latest cache refresh last night points out that there is now 2 new "repeated" comments. There is (452143+220641+132240+15671 = ) 820k comments now, totalling 54% of the total comments.
* 55957 comments with "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. ..."
* 13649 comments with: "I was outraged by the Obama/Wheeler FCC's decision to reclassify the Internet as a regulated \"public utility\" under a Depression-era law written for the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly. ..."
There are a bunch of repeated pro net neutrality comments, but they tend to be variances of "I support strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISPs."
There are 263512 unique comments, and 14859 comments repeated twice, 4318 comments repeated thrice.
https://medium.com/@csinchok/an-analysis-of-the-anti-title-i...