There's a scene in Deep Blue Sea, a stupid but fun movie about super smart sharks, in which one of the main characters sacrifices herself to prevent a shark from escaping to the ocean out of a penned-in area. She cuts herself to leak blood into the water and says, "It may be the smartest animal in the world, but it's still just an animal." The shark smells the blood, turns around and goes back into the pen, eats her, and is destroyed by explosives. This reminds me of modern politicians; sure they seek money and are corrupt and out of touch, but they are still just politicians. They do respond when millions of people engage.
Which brings me to net neutrality, of course, because now eBay has chimed in on internet freedom with a bang:
eBay this week unleashed a political machine that should make politicians envious: a national e-mail blast over Net neutrality.Meg Whitman, chief executive of the Internet auctioneer, called on more than a million eBay members to get involved in the debate over telecommunications laws and "send a message to your representatives in Congress before it is too late."
"The telephone and cable companies in control of Internet access are trying to use their enormous political muscle to dramatically change the Internet," Whitman wrote. "It might be hard to believe, but lawmakers in Washington are seriously debating whether consumers should be free to use the Internet as they want in the future."
This is the first time that eBay has used e-mail to urge its members to weigh in on a national issue and the first time Whitman has sent an e-mail to members under her own name, the company said Thursday.
This is a big deal. People like companies like eBay and Google. You don't see them running stupid ads about how hard their employees work for you, because they aren't billing services attached to publicly subsidized infrastructure and their services actually deliver added value. Now there are of course problems with each company, but broadly speaking people like their Google's and eBay's and are at best ambivalent about their Verizon's. This is because Google and eBay emerged from communities - Google from the academic world of computer science/venture capital and eBay from the early message board culture of the internet. Verizon is a regulatory creature, borne of and for lobbyists and insiders, as are the cable companies. They have a grassroots component in the form of their employees. It's a little understood element of right-wing lobbying and GOTV operations that corporate intranets are powerful tools for electoral work. But their electoral muscle is nothing compared to that of companies that people actually like and rely on, such as Google and eBay.
Now that eBay is moving into this fight with a very public grassroots lobbying campaign, the stakes have changed. Net neutrality is no longer a nice-to-have in a telco reform bill. It has become an issue that millions of ordinarily apolitical individuals that have a commercial and cultural interest in the internet are engaging on.
I have a few other updates that I'll get to later. The telcos are running TV ad campaigns all over the country, and there are more new bamboozlement flacking points to knock down. The House vote on the net neutrality issue is quickly approaching, next week, and it looks like there will be some fireworks around the rules for the votes on the floor. The House has always been rigged, and though we've managed to jiggle some pieces loose, it's still largely a done deal there. The Senate though is paying attention very closely because of the work we've done. And now that millions more are engaged anything's possible.
The telcos may have these politicians in their pocket, but they are still just politicians.
|
|
|
Permalink :: 31 Comments :: Post a Comment
|
In order to post a comment, you must be logged in. If you have a member account, please log in to comment.
If not, you can make an account right here. It's quick and free.
