Despite presumable ballot stuffing, [link|http://news.com.com/2100-1001-831678.html|the nays have it]

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In the report filed with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the Justice Department said it had received 30,000 responses, 1,250 unrelated to the case. Roughly half the comments were against the settlement, 7,500 were in favor of the deal, and 7,000 expressed no sentiment either way.

[link|http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/industry/02/07/microsoft.antitrust.ap/index.html|They don't bloody like spam]

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Overall, only a tenth of the more than 30,000 messages were classified by the department as "containing a degree of detailed substance."

"These substantive comments range from brief, one or two page discussions of some aspect of the (settlement) to 100 or more pages, detailed discussions of numerous of its provisions or alternatives," department lawyers wrote.

Of those, prosecutors said only 45 were "major," based on their length and detail.

The Bush administration encouraged Americans to comment on the proposed settlement via e-mail, rather than fax or hard copy. It got what it wanted -- 90 to 95 percent of them came electronically, the department estimated.

But at the same time, some of the hazards of the Internet were evident.

About 2,800 of the comments were form letters -- both pro- and anti-Microsoft groups offered their supporters a way to sign on to a prewritten document.

More than a thousand messages are said by Justice to have been completely off-topic. Some of those were advertisements -- known as "spam" -- and at least one e-mail contained pornography.

"The United States proposes not to publish such submissions or to provide them as part of its filing to the court," Justice lawyers wrote.