Clearing up the confusion about Sunlight’s analysis of network neutrality comments to the FCC

[Commentary] Our commitment to transparency, to open data and to the informed use of that data prompted us to do this follow up to address some of the concerns and reaction to Sunlight's latest analysis of public comments on the Federal Communications Commission's proposal to regulate Internet traffic:

1. A number of groups on the pro-network neutrality side of the debate are telling us that they submitted far more comments than we found in the download from the FCC. As we pointed out in our initial post, there’s a big discrepancy between the number of comments the FCC says it received and the number we were able to find in the files the agency released to the public
2. The conservative group that appears to have generated the vast majority of comments in the second set of comments we analyzed said we confirmed it “won” the comment period. In fact, as we were careful to point out in both our first and second post, these numbers cannot be read the same way as a baseball score. That’s partly because of data noise and partly because of the way those numbers were generated, both factors which we went to some pains to elucidate in our post.

If nothing else, this exercise points out both the value and the shortcomings of government data and suggests that for the sake of decision makers, and the taxpayers who pay them, it might be worth investing in a more modern, reliable way of compiling and reporting this information.