That's it. Burn DC to the ground. I got to my inbox yesterday and found yet another example of dishonest hackery from Mike McCurry's group on net neutrality and internet freedom. This time it's a negative hit piece, backed by a massive blogad campaign. The telcos, so you know, are spending millions of dollars a week on this fight. This ad is an example of it, repeating the lie that the government had no role in the internet's success and that bloggers are a bunch of irresponsible rabble.
First, the childish and nasty tone of the McCurry ad (located at http://www.dontregulate.org) is ridiculous. The snapshot to left is from their flash ad and is supposed to represent the Save the Internet Coalition. Look at it closely. You see the sign 'I love Alyssa'? That's meant to showcase the group as immature college hippies who don't know what we're talking about. Members of the Savetheinternet.com coalition like Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Lessig, Vint Cerf, and the American Library Association are experts in how knowledge flows and how the internet works. They know this issue cold. Tim is actually an architect of a key piece of the internet, that whole 'www' thing. But I'm sure he's in this fight because he loves Alyssa and protesting, right?
McCurry and his flacks are pulling the ultimate insider move - calling the 600,000 people who have signed the petition and the thousands of bloggers who have written about this issue childish rabble and unfit for discourse. Way to go and insult 600,000 people, Mike McCurry! McCurry's company (ironically titled Grassroots Enterprises) sure knows the grassroots!
Serious, this is a totally clueless attempt to attack and discredit the grassroots and the blogs. By coming out with a dishonest and destructive campaign that repeats every single reactionary attack on bloggers, McCurry and his ilk are revealing themselves as naively unprepared for the future.
Ok, now the substance. The ad makes a couple of claims. One, that web site operators don't pay for the internet. That is a lie. They pay massive sums of money for bandwidth, on the order of $10 billion last year alone. So does the public in tax subsidies for telecom companies, perhaps as high as $200 billion over the years (though it's hard to tell with all the mergers and weird accounting). Yes, that you read that right. Two, they claim they have never degraded a web site or service. Of course, executives for these companies are on record discussing their plans to do precisely that. The telco sponsored legislation would strip the FCC from being able to deal with degraded service or blocked web sites. Three, the telecom companies claim that net neutrality means intrusive government regulation. This claim is a bit harder to unpack, but it's worth following me here since what they are saying is in fact 180 degrees from the truth.
Here's the deal. The internet has always had rules. One of those rules is that even if you own a pipe, you're not allowed to tell people what they can put through that pipe. You can't block web sites, you can't say 'don't stream video', and you can't dictate what people and can't say. You do have to pay for the pipe you use; Google pays millions a month on one end, and millions of consumers pay smaller amounts ($20-$60) a month on the other. But no one can tell you what you can do with those pipes. It's very much the opposite of cable TV. There are no gatekeepers, and that's by design. This has created a highly competitive marketplace.
Through a series of regulatory decisions from 2002-2005, the FCC stripped these protections for broadband pipes. Now telecom companies can do whatever they want, and they have basically announced business models that depend on their ability to turn the internet into a more cable-like service. This new playground for them is tenous, because the FCC could at any point reverse themselves. To firm this up, the telecom companies want to legislate a change in the rules, stripping authority from the FCC to hold ISPs accountable for degrading service.
So that's what this is all about.
Now, in their ad campaigns, the telecoms are portraying something very different. They are trying to pretend that they don't want government regulating the internet. In fact, they just want to make sure that the rules that have worked for thirty years are stripped away so they can control it.
This was on full display at a lobbyist sponsored event I attended yesterday put on for community groups. They asked me not to record it so I don't have verbatim transcripts, but let's just say it was a bunch of bad faith in fancy suits. Company flacks scaremongered about telemedicine and how it can't be reliably delivered unless you get rid of network neutrality and allow phone companies to control the innards of the internet. They talked about how the government will somehow destroy the internet (even though the government did, you know, build the internet). They implied that there will be no parental controls if Congress doesn't get rid of net neutrality. They said if they don't get their way 'internet freedom will vanish forever'. They said that the government doesn't regulate the internet yet you shouldn't worry because under their plan the FCC has authority to protect consumers from abusive behavior by telecoms on the internet, as if that's not a regulation.
I'm getting really tired of this. We're trying to discuss policy options on how to make the internet work. They are lying about us and what we're after. There is no debate here. What's remarkable is that this industry likes to pretend it's in a competitive marketplace when it receives billions of subsidies for network build-outs, as well as government franchises to eliminate competition. It literally profits from the public treasury while insulting the public with dishonest PR campaigns. I am beginning to think that these telecom companies and cable operators, with their billions in tax subsidies and monopoly franchises, want to see legislation that removes their government determined advantages. I mean why else would they treat the public as if we're stupid? Why else would they kick up this hornets nest and then insult us with hysterics? Why else would they call us rabble? If they really want competition, and that means no more assistance from the public treasury, maybe that's what they should get. If they really want a competitive broadband market, then maybe we should give it to them.
How does that sound, Mr. McCurry, grassroots internet expert?
UPDATE: Someone from Grassroots Enterprise emailed me and let me know that they have nothing to do with this campaign. Mike McCurry is on their board and used to be their CEO, but the company didn't build the site and didn't participate in the campaign.
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