I've been meaning to blog this for a few days, but you may have noticed a few items on Breaking Blue about a major step for the Save the Internet coalition: our first legislative victory.  Maine passed into law a provision ordering the Office of the Public Advocate to investigate what Maine could legally do to protect net neutrality in Maine, with the understanding that net neutrality is critical for Maine business and democracy in Maine.  There was heavy lobbying against this by Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, but the lobbying campaign failed.  

The Maine legislature, pressured by Common Cause, League of Young Voters, the Community Television Association of Maine, the Maine Civil Liberties Union, and the blog Turn Main Blue, has taken the extraordinary first step of pushing for net neutrality protections.  There was some discussion about whether to pass a full-blown law mandating protections for net neutrality, but the legislature settled on an investigation of the state's authority to prevent a costly legal challenge.  Depending on the outcome of that investigation, you can expect either a state resolution calling on Congress to mandate net neutrality protections, or an actual law protecting net neutrality in Maine.

There are a few reasons this resolution passed in Maine and did not in Maryland.  First of all, Maine has a clean elections system, so legislators can make decisions without immense pressure from corporate interests.  Second of all, for institutional reasons, CWA is weak in Maine, and so did not really play in this dispute.  It was CWA that killed the Maryland resolution, and that is keeping the Democratic leadership from embracing net neutrality in their technology agenda.

The lessons are clear going forward.  We need public financing of elections, and we need to persuade CWA to adopt net neutrality as a core policy principle.  They aren't far, and I'm hoping that we can have a fruitful dialogue with them on the issue.

In April, I asked you to email CWA President Larry Cohen.  You may have noticed that I stopped blogging about them for awhile, and that's because I have been in contact with senior policy analyst Debbie Goldman, who has been patiently working to facilitate a dialogue.  Their President, Larry Cohen, invited me to meet with them on May 11, and since then we've been working to schedule a dialogue and negotiating the contours of it.  Their spam filter ate about eight of my emails, so if you emailed Larry Cohen there's a good chance it didn't get to him.  So bottom line, I've been trying to schedule a meeting with the CWA for about a month now, a meeting Larry kindly suggested we have.  

Aside from this willingness to dialogue, there's a lot of great progress on the telecom reform front.  Maine's resolution is a great step forward, since we know have a demonstrated legislative success.  And CWA's willingness to talk to net neutrality proponents is hopeful, as is the Brodsky bill being discussed in New York state and blogged on the Albany Project for near universal build-out.  This one's in Eliot Spitzer's court, if he decides to get going on it against the interests of the telecom and cable companies, we can have his back with a massive CWA/Moveon/blog push.  That bill, which includes buildout provisions and net neutrality is backed by a coalition of consumer groups, media reform groups, and CWA.  And then of course, there's the 700 spectrum auction, which Kevin Drum frames really nicely here.  

All in all, we're making great progress organizing around this policy issue.  Every single Democratic Presidential candidate has come out for net neutrality, and so has Mike Huckabee (for an amusing threat from big business interests towards Huckabee, see Scott Cleland's post, where the operative quote is 'Don't believe this is his "official" policy position for a minute.').  Freepress, for whom I did a bit of consulting work earlier this year, just won a webbie for its SavetheInternet campaign, and is well-respected in the Beltway for their expertise.  We've got strong industry allies.  This is an ongoing fight against some of the nastiest industries in America - cable and telecom - and it's going to take a long time.  But I'm encouraged, because our strategic openings keep expanding, and we're getting better and better at this.  

Congrats, Maine lawmakers, for doing the right thing.  And good job, Common Cause, Maine Civil Liberties Union, the League of Young Voters, Community Television Association of Maine, and Turn Maine Blue.  This stuff matters.

Ok, so get ready for a really messed up backstory on the whole Fox News/CBC/Presidential politics angle.  Ben Smith at the Politico reminded me this sordid episode, and it's a nice microcosm of horrible insider corporate Democratic politics.  Here's the story.

One of the things I've learned is that building an open and neutral communications environment is a slugfest, a game of inches.  America has a top-down mass communications environment and a populace that is used to being marketed to.  We don't like thousands of advertising messages a day from people who lie to us for profit, but we accept it because it doesn't seem like there's any choice.  This creates a weird sort of muted anger that comes out in flashpoints on the right and the left (anger at free trade, immigration, and anti-media sentiments for starters).  Anyway, the net neutrality fight has shown us what happens when a frustrated public begins to organize against corporate elites.  AT&T, Verizon, and their various hired flunkies like Mike McCurry lie, obfuscate, and betray the public.  But when the political winds shift, they shift, and today there was an important and perceptible shift in the fight.  AT&T, the single worst company in terms of net neutrality, gave up a lot of ground to an angry public.

Here's the story - as a condition of AT&T's merger with Bellsouth, AT&T as agreed to net neutrality protections for 24 months or until net neutrality legislation is passed.  Scholar Tim Wu has a good analysis of the deal and how the precedent of this regulation will allow Congress to act more effectively to legislate on net neutrality protections.  The FCC will probably approve the merger with these new conditions.  Even though the merger shouldn't go through, getting net neutrality protections for the tens of millions of customers who use AT&T is a massive victory for a Bush-dominated FCC.  This is the biggest, baddest lobby in DC, and they didn't just lose on net neutrality last cycle, they lost again in what should have been a slam dunk.

There are a number of really important concessions that AT&T made.  First of all, the company acknowledged that the public has an interest in regulating these networks, that these networks are not AT&T's private property but are a regulated public communications vehicle that AT&T manages for profit.  This is a hugely important moral claim, and it shows that the public has won a subtle victory on who should control public communication.  Hint, it's not AT&T.  Second of all, this victory showed that the public can regulate AT&T's network.  AT&T CEO Ed Whiteacre, Hands Off the Internet Chair Mike McCurry, and telco-controlled Senator Ted Stevens have all argued that net neutrality can't be defined and so it can't be regulated.  Well it turns out that telecom companies can define net neutrality when it allows them to make billions.  Funny that.

There are other important technical victories here, including the fact that WiMax can now be subject to net neutrality regulations.  Now of course this is not a perfect deal, and there are very savvy skeptics who believe that AT&T will try to drive a truck through what look like very small loopholes.  And frankly, I tend to agree that these companies - the executives and lobbyists of whom lie without blinking - will try to get around any regulation they can, and failing that, will simply break the law and litigate.  We should be under no illusions that Verizon and AT&T act in good faith, ever, and react to anything except brute political force and their own greed.  I assume they will betray, but in betraying the deal, AT&T will show that it needs more regulatory oversight and not less, and in betraying it will generate even more of a public backlash.  There's going to be a fight in Congress over extending net neutrality protections through legislation, as well as genuinely building out a national high speed universal internet that these companies work against and that countries like South Korea had years ago.

For now, we can take solace in the fact a Bush-crony dominated FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, and a multi-billion dollar telecom industry, lost to a group of public interest advocates and a fed-up public.  These executives, who do none of the work of operating the systems they use to loot the public through obnoxious toll-booths and subpar services, lost not only this battle, but the intellectual argument that they are anything but a series of PACs and lobbyists attached to a billing service.  And that's going to hurt.

Wow, if true, Taylor catches something that is really really bad.

At 3:36 a.m., a very sensitive communication from the Kerry camp was relayed to Rove and Bartlett at the White House. Mike McCurry, Clinton's former White House press secretary and a last-minute addition to the Kerry campaign, had e-mailed Nicole Devenish, the Bush campaign communications director, an off-the-record congratulations, advising that the Bush team should not try to force a resolution now. Don't pressure Kerry, McCurry said. In the end, he believed Kerry would do the right thing.

Bartlett and others told Bush about the e-mail, summarizing the message as "We'll do the right thing at the right time." They could trust that McCurry would be in a position to know what the Kerry campaign was thinking, Bartlett said, but they had to be careful not to put too much stock in it. At least we know there are people in the Kerry camp giving rational advice, Bartlett said. ... ...

Card said they should declare victory. ... ... ...

STATE OF DENIAL, by Bob Woodward (pgs. 344-347)

Like Carville, McCurry owes an explanation to his fellow Democrats.

Over the next few years, I expect the African-American political blogosphere to explode in importance.  I've met enough African-American reform leaders to make me believe that there's a African-American 'Crashing the Gates' movement happening right now and that it's about to come online.  The NAACP suffers from the same institutional inertia as NARAL and the Sierra Club, and that means there's a market for new leadership.

For instance, the Republic of T has an important post on Bobby Rush and his support of the COPE Act.  The CBC is an important battleground in the fight over net neutrality, paralleling the fight that we're having now over liberal boomers cutting deals with the right to hold onto power.

That may be the reason Bobby Rush takes big checks from telecoms, to make sure, as one of the articles above puts it, to make sure that the "right" neighborhoods get faster downloads and that his constituents' communities remain the "wrong" neighborhoods. Keep the internet out of the "wrong" neighborhoods, or impede access to it, and you keep potential political power out of the "wrong" neighborhoods and -- more to the point -- out of the hands of the people who live in those neighborhoods.

At Jack and Jill Politics, Jill is fighting for the character of the Congressional Black Caucus and the open bragging by Al Wynn of his stolen election.  On the non-blog front, I've also recently started getting emails from ColorOfChange.org, a group asserting leadership on progressive black issues.  And I just noticed ForwardPAC, a PAC to support progressive African-American women.

The net neutrality is a very important signaling fight, because it cuts right through the rotten core of our political system.  The Mike McCurry's and the Al Wynn's are part of the same generation of political operatives, the post-1974 group that decided that collusion with right-wing interests made strategic sense.  Beating them back is going to take time, but it's happening all over.

Sorry to bring up net neutrality again, but we're really in the final stages of putting the nail in the coffin for the Stevens legislation.  Senator Sununu is predicting that it will be delayed into 2007, which means a rewrite of the bill and the possibility of getting an affirmative net neutrality regulation into the bill.  We're close to winning this stage, in other words.  The telecom people know this, and have changed tactics.  The most recent idea is to release a poll that purports to show that the public really wants their bill passed.  The idea is that rather than argue on the merits of net neutrality, an argument the telecom companies have already lost, they will argue that the Stevens bill is really really popular.   Core to the credibility of the poll is the notion that the firms who did the poll come from both sides of the aisle and is therefore bipartisan.  I'll get to that at the end of the post, but I want to actually show why the conclusions from the survey don't actually make sense.

First, some context.  Net neutrality is the single most controversial piece of the bill and the only piece that has gotten any free media or organizing push behind it.  If Americans have heard of the bill, they probably would have heard of net neutrality.  Given this fact, the poll is self-discreding on its face, because according to the Glover Park Group the data seems to say that only 8% of the voting public has heard of net neutrality but that the voting public by overwhelming margins wants the Stevens bill bill passed.  The telcos are trying to prove that (a) the public hasn't heard of the debate and doesn't care about net neutrality and (b) the public has heard of the debate and wants a new telecom bill passed.  It's slightly more complicated than this, but that's the general idea.  You can read the poll yourself, and it's clear from the way that the survey is structured that it is leading to a false conclusion of popular support for this legislation.

Anyway, I didn't think that this poll would be taken seriously by anyone.  Apparently I was wrong.  So here's a fuller debunking of the poll by Joel Wright, a professional pollster who has, you know, standards.

1. Question wording is pathetic and is clearly geared toward positive responses. Example: in the Likelihood of More Choice question, there are no negative impacts tested. All are positive impacts, so they're telegraphing to respondents that positives are the only possible result. The question they ask is how likely those positive impacts are. Bullshit research.

2. Do a double ditto on the above when it comes to the next question: Importance of Leg. Elements. The stem specifically and only notes passage of the legislation and then only the BENEFITS of that passage. This is beyond pathetic, it's close to unethical in a purported 'objective' survey.

3. The loaded nature is 'proven', as close as you can get to it, in their own data. In the Want Senator to Vote For/Against Question. 80 to 5? Get outta here. You don't get 80/5 on anything. In particular the low against (5) is a clear indicator of biased questions. There're more people UNSURE (15%) than against. This is an absurd result.

4. And then there's the last question wording. Jeepers this is crap. The wording literally describes a benefit for consumers and a negative for consumers' providers (barring broadband providers from offering services) as the choice. So the choice is benefit for you vs. a negative for your provider. Whaa? Of course consumers jump on their own benefit given that, for one thing. More importantly though, providers win, regardless of how people respond. This IS unethical.

5. In my view, the big kicker is comparing the national data to the states. Example: in the Want Senator to Vote For/Against, their data show national For: 80%, PA: 84%, OH: 80%, MO: 80%. With a margin of error of 5 points for the state data, they're telling us there is NO significant variation in ANY state surveyed from the national numbers. Beyond bullshit.  This shows a question designed to elicit high numbers for them. No variation IS A PROBLEM. Harder case to make to the press, but true nonetheless.

So who is doing this unethical and poorly done poll?  Well none other than our friends at the Glover Park Group and Public Opinions Strategies.  Here's part of the press release from Senator Ted Stevens' Commerce Committee.

Bill McInturf, co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, and Amy Phee, partner at The Glover Park Group presented the bipartisan survey's results. The Glover Park Group is headed by Joe Lockhart, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, and is widely used by Democratic strategists. Public Opinion Strategies has conducted polling for a variety of Republican candidates including Republican presidential hopefuls. - Senate Commerce Committee press release

Ah, don't you just love the Glover Park Group?  In June, they release a memo arguing that Democrats shouldn't take on the prescription drug fiasco even as the company is paid by health care interests.  And now they are doing downright unethically worded polling with Republican polling firms pushing for the end of net neutrality.  What's striking though is not the work they do, but the dishonest way they market their work as coming from important Democratic sources.  Lockhart is using his position as former Clinton White House press secretary to add credibility to the study, and Amy Phee is using her position as a former employee of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research to do so as well.  

Core to the credibility of this poll is that the two firms that did it come from opposite sides of the aisle.  Public Opinion Strategies is a right-wing polling outfit and clearly unethical in their business work.  They will and should suffer for their lack of ethics around the data they put out.  Still, it's Glover Park that enables Senator Stevens and Verizon in this tactic by allowing them to pay for the bipartisanship dishonesty they need to pull off this PR strategy.

At this point, there's a serious credibility problem emerging with the Glover Park Group.  Twice now they have proven their willingness to put out bad information in service of powerful interests while masquerading as Democratic strategists.  Carter Eskew, a key aide to Lieberman in the primary, and Howard Wolfson, a senior advisor to Senator Clinton, work at Glover Park, so this is a powerful group of Democrats.  It's time for Democratic clients of this organization and ethical partners within Glover Park itself to put a stop to the dishonest tactics.  It's fairly clear that the Glover Park's main asset is its credibility, and that's going to die pretty quickly if they keep doing stuff like this.  In addition, this unethical lobbying behavior is going to tag politicians like Senator Clinton who are in favor of net neutrality, and those like Kirsten Gillibrand, who are using Glover Park-allied firms or personnel to make their political decisions.  It's bad for everyone involved, and it needs to stop.

I've got my hands on some poor quality polling done by the Glover Park Group and Public Opinion Strategies on net neutrality.  It's being passed around on the Hill by the telecom shills.

Here's a sample question:

Which is Most Important to You?

Which of the following two items do you think is the most important to you:  

Delivering the benefits of new TV and video choice so consumers will see increased competition and lower prices for cable TV

OR

Enhancing Internet neutrality by barring high speed internet providers from offering specialized services like faster speed and increased security for a fee

The rest of the questionnaire is similarly structured along the lines of 'do you want lots and lots of pie or would you like a kidney infection'.

I did find one piece of data interesting, assuming that this poll is worth anything at all (which it's not).  According to this data, 7% of registered voters have heard about the fight over net neutrality in Congress.  That's amazing, since there's been basically no reporting done on the topic.  It's also probably not true, since this is worth less than a random set of monkey scratches.  Also Verizon paid $60,000 for this.

Read this blog post on Computerworld and you'll get a sense of what public policy discussions look like in a progressive America.  They are widely searching, deliberative, richly nuanced, and most of all, they engage the public.  That's what the old press flacks are missing.  The public.

This article from TNR misses the point on the fight between McCurry and the blogs.  TNR gets some of it right, that McCurry's tactics don't work online because you can't schmooze the blogosphere.  But the reporter thinks that this fight happened in some airless chamber and has nothing to do with policy.

Stoller isn't done, though. Since McCurry last wrote on The Huffington Post, the MyDD blogger has added three more McCurry-related entries: "even more bad faith from mike mccurry," "mike mccurry: more on us being internet rabble," and, finally, "clinton wh alumni: wtf?" (or "what the fuck?" in bloggerese).

Look, I wrote these posts not because I have anything against Mike McCurry but because he kept repeating the same discredited arguments.  The cartoon he released repeated falsehoods about us, for instance.

It's like Josh Marshall said.  People on the internet, for instance our own MitchiPhd, actually know things, and actually have good faith questions about net neutrality.  And we don't like it when someone repeats the same talking point to us when we have pointed out that those talking points don't make sense.  And as this legislative battle continues, McCurry is going to keep repeating the same dreck.  We're just not letting him get away with it.

I've learned a lot about media having been in this fight.  It's quite remarkable how wide and public and interesting the discussion has been on this issue.  I have a lot more faith in the public, and a lot less faith in reporters.