IP Democracy: Hyperbole on Both Sides of Net Neutrality Debate

The Washington Post’s “K Street Confidential” columnist Jeff Birnbaum devotes his column this week to the net neutrality debate. More specifically, Birnbaum tries to cut through the rhetoric to find out who’s behind all those scary ads lobbed at folks inside the Beltway.

What Birnbaum finds is, of course, a bunch of “astroturf” groups and he’s not cutting either side any slack.

To hear partisans talk, you’d think that nothing short of the future of the Internet, or the future of cable, or even the future of telecommunications, is at stake. Now, I concede that something more than mere pricing may well be on the line here. After all, consumers will be affected — one way or the other.

But the exact impact is near impossible to decipher if you read or watch what the opposing lobbies put out to the public — a situation that I’m sad to say is part of the not-so-great tradition of telecom lobbying.

Start with the name of a group backed by AT&T and BellSouth Corp., among others, that wants to block net neutrality legislation. It’s called Hands Off the Internet. I kid you not.

First, let’s be clear: There is very little that is “neutral” or “hands off” about any side of this argument. These are friendly-sounding terms that have no real meaning in the context of this battle.

Second, no one can determine who is supporting Hands Off the Internet by looking at its ads alone. To find out, one must dig into its Web site ( http://www.handsoff.org/ ).

Birnbaum accuses the Hands-Off folks of “double-speak,” but he gives no gold stars to the pro-net neutrality people either.

The other side of the debate is just as slippery. Take the pro-net-neutrality group called It’s Our Net. Its funding is provided (according to its Web site, http://itsournet.org/ ) by such big online firms as Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc., Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Inc. And its claims are at times just as vague and misleading as its opponents’.

For a treat, read Birnbaum’s live discussion with Post readers, held this afternoon. While the queue of questioners was clearly populated by suspiciously well-versed pro- and anti-net neutrality readers, Birnbaum is positively, well, neutral when it comes to the theories, arguments and scenarios lobbed at him in the online chat. He did not agree, or disagree or argue with the sophisticated queries and comments that came his way. (In fact, at one point he said “I’m going to say out of this; I don’t want to take sides.”)

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on June 26, 2006 5:39 PM to IP Democracy