When political blogs collide with the technical world, strange things happen. It apparently all started when the ThinkProgress blog revealed what it described as a secret powerpoint presentation from April in which corporate and ideological conspirators mapped out a plan to mug network neutrality. CNET’s Declan McCullagh quickly debunked it as a student project from a Florida competition, however ThinkProgress doesn’t seem to be buying it and the furor seems to be spreading. The whole thing has me scratching my head, wondering just what could possibly be secret about the desires of AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and their friends that network neutrality die a quick death? They’re not exactly hiding, nor are their anti-regulation allies. They’re actually kind of loud, if you know what I mean.
And the recommendations, they are a trip:
- Enlist libertarian-leaning internet users and hardcore gamers. Yeah, those guys just love their ILECs and cable companies and especially politicians, and the gamer community has such fearsome political might.
- Create a Chinese blog to compare net neutrality to Chinese government censorship? Let’s see, we’re supposed to compare a prohibition on traffic filtering to the largest traffic filter ever assembled. Even the Chinese government can’t pretend that makes sense.
- Rebrand net neutrality as net brutality. Hmmm, a rhyme, how creative. But to make it really resonate don’t you need an actual victim somewhere that doesn’t earn more money than a small country? Pictures of blood and gore, starving children, potentially threatened dividends…
- Petition the FCC and the government. Now there’s an idea! We can file lots of petitions and other stuff with the FCC, just flood them in paper! Why haven’t we haven’t tried that yet? Oh yeah…
Seriously though. It makes for a reasonable student presentation I guess, but as a conspiracy document put together by the legal, strategy, and media teams of the largest telecoms in the world it would need a bit more juicing up to make a decent April Fools joke.
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Categories: Fun · Government Regulations · ILECs, PTTs
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Who is hurt by Net Neutrality? The thousands of independent ISPs and ultimately the consumer.
My independent ISP provides the entire Internet, which is what these people are after. If Comcast and AT&T ultimately want to give you cable plan type Internet, you find an independent that provides the whole thing. If there isn’t one around, either start one yourself or maybe no one wants it bad enough to provide it.
The consumer is hurt because this will put more independents out of business, reducing what competitive pressure the big guys have now and removing local customer service from the picture.
Just another nail in the little guy’s coffin.