One group dominates the second round of net neutrality comments

Meanwhile, here's how American Commitment spins the Sunlight Foundation report: 'CONSERVATIVES OPPOSED TO INTERNET REGULATION WON FCC COMMENT PERIOD BY LANDSLIDE.'

“We’re pleased that the Sunlight Foundation is finally confirming that American Commitment and Americans opposed to regulation of the Internet won the FCC comment period. Better late than never,” said Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment.

http://www.americancommitment.org/content/conservatives-oppo...

Note how they say they 'won' the comment period, as if each letter or email counted as a vote and the FCC is obliged to treat the input quantitatively rather than qualitatively. This sort of lobbying is a win-win for the advocacy organizations that engage in it (across the political spectrum): either the government does what they want and they declare victory, or the government does not in which case they fulminate about 'the will of the people' being thwarted and do another round of fundraising/PR on the back of that. You can make quite a nice living running a 'nonprofit' like this - $175k/year is a decent salary for booking adverts using donors' money.

http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/452/4526005...

For context, see Fight for the Future's blog post on why "numerous problems with [the Sunlight Foundation's] data and their methodology make it impossible to support their conclusions": http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/105475259503/why-is...

I hope the FCC sees this or has tools to detect these manipulations.

I don't see how this is different to all the pro net neutrality activism and lobbying going on, except that it's an opposition opinion.

It also seems to play on the narrative that people who are against expanding regulation are not rational individuals, they are instead reduced to mere tools controlled by a pair of Koch villains intent on destruction of earth and society to make themselves richer.

The Republican Party and to a greater extent, the Tea Party, have mobilized a mostly-white, mostly-male, mostly-middle-to-lower-class pool of voters who are in many cases irrational - voting against their better interests in the name of conviction, mostly based on race and religion. It's why there is constant saber-rattling about "wedge issues" like abortion and "takers" despite a significant portion of Tea Party voters being around or below the poverty line, or reliant on some degree of public assistance.

This army of people does often mobilize as a single unit, dictated to through the likes of Fox News. Talk about how black people want free "X" and you can get lots of people to fill out a form letter without trying.

We're a Republic for the very reason that it was known that en-masse, often times people are irrational and do go against their own benefit for ideology.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/29/working-class-v...