>If the law requires that they be considered in the process of creating policy, ... The important distinction here is that they have to be considered as commen

>If the law requires that they be considered in the process of creating policy, ... The important distinction here is that they have to be considered as comments, not votes. For example, if a whole lot of comments say more or less the same thing, then that only counts as one comment. In this case the politics had already been decided so no comment could affect the general outcome. In a very real sense the comments did not matter in this case. In other situations they can matter. The pointless distraction related to the various attempts to spam the FCC comments in the end prevented actual politics that could of possibly retained net neutrality.