For those not familiar with the term "net neutrality," it describes the rules and practices that currently keep the Internet a free and open communication medium. Net neutrality guarantees that blogs, small businesses, and organizations are on a level playing field with the largest corporations. Whether you're GM or an individual, the content you put online is accessible and delivered in the same way, with the same priority, and nothing is blocked. For communities of color, net neutrality is key. It keeps barriers to Internet entrepreneurship low so that anyone with a good idea and some technical savvy can join the 21st century economy.
Predictably, the major players in the broadband industry have been fighting the FCC's efforts to adopt rules that would solidify net neutrality principles into law, because scrapping net neutrality would enable them to make even more money by creating new revenue streams. Ironically, civil rights leaders and CBC members have joined the dominant players. Their stated reasoning: the belief that net neutrality rules could hurt efforts to close the digital divide. The problem is that, as far as I can see, the argument doesn't hold water. It falls apart whether you approach it from the perspective of business, common sense, or history.
My hope in writing my first post was that it might encourage civil rights leaders who have opposed or questioned net neutrality to publicly explain their positions. Given what's at stake, I think its incumbent on leaders opposing or questioning net neutrality to publicly make clear why. Unfortunately, none have done so.
While leadership remained silent, my post did elicit some responses, which follow the same pattern--uncritically echoing industry talking points while trying to change the subject from the arguments I put on the table. Take, for example, the open letter posted by Navarrow Wright, a former television and Internet executive and current strategic consultant. I gather from Wright's resume that he is an accomplished and intelligent guy, but his criticism of my piece typifies the shoddy argumentation and confusing of issues from the loudest voices against net neutrality. While Wright failed to engage the arguments I put on the table, in the interest of public debate, I want to take on his assumptions one by one.
Yesterday, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of John McCain selling off the internet to his campaign backers, the cable and telecom interests. After being shocked by a 3-2 vote punishing Comcast for illegal behavior at the FCC, cable interests are freaking out and using every tool at their disposal to reinstitute discipline among wavering Republicans.
The cable and telecom pushback started with former telecom lobbyist and current FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, who is desperate to become Chairman of the FCC under a McCain administration, launching a salvo against internet freedom, claiming that net neutrality would lead to censorship of the internet and requirements that bloggers and sites like Google offer 'equal time' to different views. This incoherence was quickly picked up by the Drudge Report, all to be timed with the coming release of McCain's technology policy, which is slated to come out this week or next. McDowell, who of the five FCC Commissioners is by far the most favorable to cable, did this at the Heritage Foundation. He even warned his side that there are more dissident conservatives like Kevin Martin getting ready to come out for net neutrality, a clear sign they know they are losing this fight and need to reframe their strategy.
McDowell denounced net neutrality under the guise that it's intertwined with the Fairness Doctrine, which he says Obama will reimpose. McDowell wouldn't actually explicitly say that net neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine are the same thing, means, because he knows he'd get laughed out of the room, but he implied it. Here's his statement.
I'm hearing from friends that the FCC just voted 3-2 to punish Comcast for illegally blocking internet traffic to some customers who used file-sharing software. This was a bipartisan decision, with Republican Kevin Martin standing up to vicious party and media pressure to side with Democrats Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps. Though Comcast will litigate the order and the order carries no fine, this is a precedent setting move. A few years ago, no one thought that the FCC would move to enforce its 'principles' of an open internet, figuring they were simply fig-leafs to the public interest community. With the tremendous public pressure on the issue and the egregious behavior by Comcast (and Verizon censoring NARAL's text messages and AT&T censoring Pearl Jam), the logic became too compelling to ignore.
In a series of important moves, Barack Obama came out strongly for net neutrality, every Democratic Senate challenger came out for net neutrality, and once the Democrats solidified, a few others like Republican Chip Pickering and Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin chose to protect the internet from aggressive censorship-prone corporations like Comcast. The McCain campaign, though it's against net neutrality, has been reduced to saying that the issue is not a 'President of the United States' issue and that it's 'inside baseball' not worth public discussion. The backlash has been so aggressive that even McCain, who is owned by telecom and cable interests wholesale, doesn't want to fight here.
There's another lesson here, and that's the real meaning of bipartisanship. We started this fight in 2006 with a bipartisan consensus against us, and gradually we've been able to flip the Democratic Party on our issue. And now we're beginning to flip Republicans. There was a lot of whining that net neutrality was becoming a 'partisan issue', but what we're learning is that winning a fight involves first pushing an issue through one party, making it partisan, and then making it bipartisan though the other party. The intellectual coherence of the argument, not whether you have a fig leaf Republican or a conservative Democrat on your side, is the politically powerful tool.
Republican Kevin Martin deserves real praise. He stood up to the forces in his party, the minority Leader in fact, and a vicious conservative press corps, and pushed through a protection that will help preserve an open internet. Copps and Adelstein have persevered for years in the wilderness, and now they and all of us get to savor a genuine victory.
To up the pressure on Republican FCC Chair Kevin Martin, Comcast has dispatched Republican Minority leader John Boehner to write Martin a mean letter. Boehner's letter quotes the dishonest Wall Street Journal editorial I took apart yesterday, and attacks Martin for being heavy-handed and showing poor judgment. It's funny how quickly Comcast's Republican stooges jump to do whatever it is the company wants.
When I want something from my cable company, they rarely respond within 24 hours.
Rock the Vote is considered part of the progressive civic engagement space, as young voters tend to be progressive and Democratic. It is the 800 pound guerrilla of voter mobilization for young people and sucks up money from Foundations and big dollar donors. Late last year, Rock the Vote signed a deal with AT&T to work together. I brought up AT&T's record of wiretapping and fighting against net neutrality with Heather Smith, the director of Rock the Vote, and she assured me that the company met progressive certain criteria. AT&T actually has a good record on labor rights, so I assumed that's what she meant.
Today, I learned that Rock the Vote signed a deal with Comcast. Comcast is a wiretapping fiend, actually filters their network (as opposed to AT&T), owns content it wants to distribute, AND is one of the biggest union busters around. Rock the Vote has a long history of corporate sponsorships, and often these sponsorships prevent it from really engaging with youth voters with anything but a cursory media oriented relationship. I have limited knowledge of the organization, but it seems like that's what's happening this year, again.
I blogged last week about Comcast manipulating the NAACP in Boston to push their anti-net neutrality agenda. It's a standard move from conservatives, to fund some group called, say, the Disability Council and use it to push tax cuts for oil companies. Now that their ploy in Boston failed, Comcast is moving to the open shill groups, preying upon the subtle bias of journalists, who list all groups with an ethnicity or gender in the name as a 'civil rights group'.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should allow broadband providers to manage their networks and slow "bandwidth hogs," despite concerns that such practices arbitrarily target some customers, said a coalition of seven civil rights groups.
Net neutrality rules for broadband providers would protect bandwidth hogs at the expense of other customers and civic organizations, said the coalition, which includes the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, League of Rural Voters, and National Council of Women's Organizations....
That position puts the civil rights groups at odds with several consumer rights groups, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, which have called for the FCC to stop Comcast from slowing some Internet traffic. Those groups, among a coalition of consumer rights groups that filed a complaint against Comcast in November, submitted their own comments late Thursday, saying opponents of their argument have misrepresented them....
"We need some honesty in this debate," Harry Alford, president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "Content discrimination is a real threat to an open Internet, but so are bandwidth hogs -- particularly those who traffic in illegal, pirated material. Bandwidth management can be objectionable if it is aimed at censoring certain content, but it is in the consumer's interest if it is aimed at preserving bandwidth for consumers that pay for it."
Maybe I'm not paying attention, but I missed the march on Washington led by the National Black Chamber of Commerce for civil rights, and I missed the statement from the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association protesting the government's abuse of civil rights over FISA.
I did however notice the National Black Chamber of Commerce's denial of global warming (funded by Exxon), it's opposition to the FDA regulating tobacco (funded by Altria), and its work to privatize Social Security because "Blacks, on average, pay far more in Social Security taxes than they can ever expect to receive in benefits."
The NBCC is one of many of these groups funded by telecom interests, in this case Comcast. It's a shame that journalists like Grant Gross of IDG News Service gives them credibility by dubbing them 'civil rights' groups. This is one of the more cynical corporate tactics in polluting our national discourse, using the funding of great brands like the NAACP to build abusive relationships and astroturf groups like the NBCC to push a corporate agenda.
It's very annoying, but it's the only card Comcast has yet to play. This company needs to be broken up, as it is a bad faith operator that should not have control over what is actually public infrastructure, internet and cable access to much of the country.
By now you've probably heard that Comcast hired a crowd to sit in an FCC hearing on net neutrality so interested citizens couldn't get a spot to speak. The gist of Comcast's excuse is that they hired people to hold spots for Comcast employees, though those people accidentally fell asleep and stayed in their seats throughout the entire hearing. Nuts.
Interestingly, there's a bit more to the story, and it involves the cozy relationship between the NAACP and Comcast. Corporate funding of civil rights groups has been a quiet and dank hallmark of liberal politics for decades. Most of the time these partnerships are innocent, but they lead to some coincidentally problematic situations. For example, here's what else was going on in Boston around the FCC the day before the rent-a-crowd incident.
On the same day and location of the hearing, the Boston and Cambridge, Mass., branches of the NAACP plan to host a "take back our media" rally, according to a flier that was circulated on the Internet.
The flier includes quotations from several civil rights groups criticizing Martin's policies on media ownership. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was quoted as claiming Martin supports a "massive new and unjustified welfare for the rich program."
But in a statement Friday, Jackson denied making such a comment and said it does not reflect his position or that of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "We have always enjoyed a constructive relationship with the FCC and look forward to continuing it," the statement said.
Martin defended his efforts as FCC chairman, saying the agency has been "active and proactive in taking steps to increase minority ownership."
Most of the quotations took issue at Martin's efforts to push cable operators to offer channels on an a la carte basis. His proposal has met with opposition from the industry, which says it would hurt minority programming.
The flier initially did not include the rally sponsors. A later version, supplied to the AP by a public relations firm, included the NAACP's Boston and Cambridge branches as organizers.
According to Karen Payne, president of the Boston branch of the civil rights group, the rally was sparked by the sale of Boston radio station WILD-FM in 2006. The station's urban format was popular in the black community.
Payne said the NAACP had not authorized the release of the flier, and that as of Friday night, it was still in the draft stages.
So a flyer calling for a rally protesting the FCC under the NAACP's name, put out by a PR firm, and disavowed by the local NAACP as simply a 'draft', was going around on the same day as a net neutrality hearing that Comcast packed with a crowd they hired to prevent net neutrality advocates from attending. And on that very same day, this letter to the editor in the Washington Post attacking net neutrality shows up, from Jose Marquez of the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology, an astroturf group sponsored by Sprint, the cell phone carrier most aligned with Comcast and the cable industry. In addition, the founder of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing group that pushed for the privatization of Social Security in 2005, wrote this piece attacking FCC Chair Kevin Martin for being a racist.
A cynic might say that Comcast, caught red-handed blocking and manipulating the internet traffic of their users is trying to divert attention from the FCC investigation and possible subpoena threat by state AG's by doing a PR campaign around cries of racism. I just think that the NAACP should be a lot more careful in how and when their name shows up when large conservative corporations would want to use their name to distract from their lawbreaking.
Aside from being politically powerful, cable companies are assholes. When not blocking peer to peer services (and being sued for it), Comcast is working with BitTorrent to promote a tv network it owns.
The subtext here is that Comcast has a really crappy network because it refused to invest in infrastructure, mostly because cable companies are really greedy and can't do anything properly except steal from shareholders and annoy customers.
According to an AP article, Comcast is blocking the sharing of certain files between users, thereby violating the concept of Net Neutrality.
Below is an except from their article. After the break I have included the text of an email sent out by FreePress calling for action against ComCast.
NEW YORK --A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars on Thursday formally asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast Corp. from interfering with file sharing by its Internet subscribers.....
The petitions will be the first real test of the FCC's stance on "Net Neutrality," the principle that Internet traffic be treated equally by carriers. The agency has a policy supporting the concept but its position hasn't been tested in a real-world case.
The long-standing industry practice of treating Internet traffic more or less equally has started to fray. In tests spanning several states, The Associated Press found that Comcast hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. The findings, first reported Oct. 19, confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with other file-sharing applications.
FreePress has already started an action against Comcast. Below is their email and a link to sign their petition.
She is none other than 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw, who took the aforementioned implement to her local Comcast office in Manassas to settle a score, and boy, did she!
This was after the company had scheduled installation of its much ballyhooed "Triple Play" service, which combines phone, cable and Internet services, in Shaw's brick home in nearby Bristow. But Shaw said they failed to show up on the appointed day, Monday, Aug. 13. They came two days later but left with the job half done. On Friday morning, they cut off all service.
This was the company that has had consumer service problems serious enough to prompt the trade magazine Advertising Age to editorialize that Comcast and other cable providers should spend less on advertising and more on customer service. And has spawned a blog called ComcastMustDie.com that's filled with posts from angry customers.
So on that Friday, Mona Shaw and her husband, Don, went to the local call center office to complain.
Let's pick it up, mid-action, according to Shaw:
Mona demands to speak to a manager. A customer service representative says someone will be right with them. Directs them to a bench, outside. (Remember, it's mid-August.) Mona and Don sit.
Tick, tick, tick, goes the clock. Sit, sit, sit, go Mona and Don.
For. Two. Hours.
And then -- this is the best part -- the customer rep leans out the door and says the manager has left for the day. Thanks for coming!
Oh, the sputtering outrage!
The insulting idea that, as Shaw puts it, "they thought just because we're old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone."
So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don's claw hammer and said: "C'mon, honey, we're going to Comcast."
Did you try to stop her, Mr. Shaw?
"Oh no, no," he says.
Hammer time: Shaw storms in the company's office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!
"They cuffed me right then," she says.
Her take on Comcast: "What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles."
And here's who she is.
She and Don are both retired from the Air Force (she was a registered nurse). They have been married 45 years. She is secretary of the local AARP, secretary of a square-dancing club and takes in strays for the local animal shelter (they have seven dogs at the moment). She has a heart condition. She lifts weights at a local gym. The couple attend a Unitarian Universalist church.
Police gave her the hammer back, though she swears she's content to ride off into the sunset of True Crime Stories in America, never again to go Com-smash-tic on her local cable provider.
STATE BLOGS
By now you've probably heard that Comcast