There were very large numbers of comments both for and against net neutrality, but the ones against net neutrality seemed to largely be autogenerated and fraudulent, using names of people who said they didn't write them.
I have had the same thought, and I am not sure why the veracity of the comments is fomenting so much anger. No matter what the comments had said, the FCC would have done the same thing; Pai had been very clear about his opinion on net neutrality over the course of many years.
First rule of any good investigative reporting: follow the money. Whoever paid for the comments must have had some motivation for committing fraud and identity theft en masse.
The fact that the FCC is fighting to keep the comment-purchasers IP address(es) secret is telling in and of itself though I suppose.
As for your actual premise, ‘the comments didn’t matter’, the rest of your comment invalidates your premise. Because if the comments did not matter, then the FCC would feel no need to fake the result.
What you mean to say is, ‘the comments would not effect the outcome of the FCC’s decision.’ And we can have a proper opinionated debate as to whether that is true. But the comments clearly ‘matter’.
[1] https://medium.com/ragtag-notes/bot-or-not-verifying-public-...
[2] https://medium.com/@csinchok/an-analysis-of-the-anti-title-i...
>Based on this analysis, we estimate that 91% of all anti-net-neutrality submissions, and 79% of all pro-net-neutrality submissions, came from bots.
Their survey data is mostly inconsistent with the WSJ data. See https://archive.fo/sp9Q7. WSJ had multiple orders of magnitude higher sample size, so I'd go with their numbers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-of-people-post-comment...