Elise Hu

When nearly 1.1 million net neutrality comments flooded the Federal Communications Commission this spring into the summer, they came from around the country. But the interest in open-Internet topics doesn't spread out evenly across the United States.

San Francisco-based data analysis firm Quid looked at the geographic sources of the public comments and adjusted them based on state populations. California and Washington State are overrepresented, and states in the South and Southwest -- notably the deep South -- didn't engage as strongly with this issue.

When the Federal Communications Commission asked for public comments about the issue of keeping the Internet free and open, the response was huge.

The San Francisco data analysis firm Quid looked beyond keywords to find the sentiment and arguments in those public comments. The map shows that every emergent theme was "pro" net neutrality, or supports the idea of a level playing field for content on the Internet. Taken with the entire body of comments sampled, there weren't enough unique or organic anti-net-neutrality comments to register on the map.

Unlocking the data in the comments -- using technology to show relationships between them and high occurrences of them -- helped amplify some arguments that otherwise weren't getting much play. One cluster focused on preserving net neutrality to maintain a diversity of opinion. The related but separate cluster of arguments associated net neutrality with the American dream.