OP is narrowly focused on a particular one out of fourteen companies under investigation for unclear reasons. They don't say whether they've tried similar analysis of any of the other form comments. If I had to make a wild guess, I'd say they expect more clicks here than with a more in depth investigation of everyone involved, for reasons left as an exercise to the reader.
>Astroturf exists and is a problem on all sides, yes, but this specific instance is far beyond the pale. Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation.
14 organizations are under investigation, not just one.
>But also beside the point. CQ claims they vetted their submissions for "questionable submissions".
And also gives a few examples, all of which are trivial to bypass, and all of which are automated, so it's not clear why you'd think they are manually looking at any of these before submitting unless it fails the automated tests.
I did miss that, fair enough -- amend my statement to "Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation of these 14 organizations".
> it's not clear why you'd think they are manually looking at any of these
It's not clear why you'd think 818,000 (per WSJ) identical comments submitted in alphabetical order should pass automated tests?
There's no reason to think they were submitted originally in alphabetical order. The most likely possibility here is that CQ sorted them before submitting to the FCC.
(Also, FWIW I personally witnessed it while trying to submit my own comment on the issue; the viewable posted comments were about 98% duplicates of that one "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet" etc, and the names were somewhere in the E's.)
This wasn't real-time submission, and this should be clear from OP.
Meanwhile CQ is repeatedly insistent that the submissions be recorded individually, and not by the bulk csv method; and when the API limits turn out to be too strict they go to great effort to do it anyway: "We will need to set up multiple servers to feed the API simultaneously to meet the delivery needs of our clients" -- 114 api keys compared to one or two for most other groups.
None of which sits well with your idea that they'd intentionally sort them first. Bulk submissions might be expected to be sorted. The assumption for individually submitted comments is that they're individually submitted; it exposes the astroturfiness very clearly when all the identical comments show up in strict order in the docket. (Or at the very least, if this was just a dumb goofup or excessive tidiness, why wouldn't they have simply explained that as the obvious excuse the moment it started being reported? There'd be plenty of supporting evidence, the stage space alone would have had to have been significant)
Even that WSJ article focuses largely on that specific blatant example, and notes that the several anti-NN statements they examined were "63%, 72% and 80% bogus comments" (the single pro-NN statement they examined "was 32% bogus.")
Astroturf exists and is a problem on all sides, yes, but this specific instance is far beyond the pale. Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation.
> It's trivial for any teen on 4chan to defeat those measures
That's... debatable. But also beside the point. CQ claims they vetted their submissions for "questionable submissions". If that vetting failed to notice that an identical comment was submitted through them that many times, with names in alphabetical order, then they either are lying about vetting their submissions for accuracy, or they are themselves the ones committing the fraud.