FCC Releases All Net Neutrality Comments As Giant XML Files For Data Analysis

from the open-records dept

While it had trouble keeping its site up during times of intense commenting, the FCC's IT team is now working to make all the submitted comments on its "open internet" net neutrality proposals available to download in a bunch of XML files:

Because of the sheer number of comments and the great public interest in what they say, Chairman Wheeler has asked the FCC IT team to make the comments available to the public today in a series of six XML files, totaling over 1.4 GB of data – approximately two and half times the amount of plain-text data embodied in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The release of the comments as Open Data in this machine-readable format will allow researchers, journalists and others to analyze and create visualizations of the data so that the public and the FCC can discuss and learn from the comments we’ve received. Our hope is that these analyses will contribute to an even more informed and useful reply comment period, which ends on September 10. We will make available additional XML files covering reply comments after that date.

While the more cynical among you may see this as more of a statement on the rather weak capabilities of the current FCC's system for handling searching through the submitted comments, it's still nice to see at least a move towards openness and transparency in sharing this data for others to search through. As we've noted, we've been digging into some of the data on the comments, and hopefully this will make the process much easier.

Filed Under: comments, fcc, net neutrality, nprm, open data, open internet, xml