August 10, 2006
Common Cause: Stop It With the Astro-Turfing
Common Cause has released a report on the incredible amount of astro-turfing that surrounds telecom reform legislation. Entitled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” the report is a follow-up to an earlier attack on these phoney “public interest” groups, which are, in reality, industry-financed fronts designed to mess with people’s minds.
The report eviscerates five groups: Hands Off The Internet, TV4US, netcompetition.org, The Future…Faster and Video Access Alliance. Common Cause reserves its worst criticism for Hands Off The Internet and netcompetition.org.
If there were an award for Astroturf lobby campaigns, Hands Off the Internet (HOTI) would win hands down.
With its pithy name, viral web cartoons, high profile spokesman (former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry) and barrage of print and television advertising, HOTI has been effectively injecting the telephone industry’s arguments on net neutrality into the public debate in recent months.
And they manage to do it while hiding their relationship with their corporate backers.
Netcompetition.org (led by supposed independent analyst Scott Cleland) is anything but the open forum for debating net neutrality that it says it is.
NetCompetition.org presents itself as a membership organization that brings people together to debate the merits of various telecom reform proposals. But the only diversity in NetCompetition.org’s list of supporters is cable industry interests versus phone industry interests.
And since cable and telephone companies both support the telecom legislation currently being considered in Congress, and both oppose net neutrality, it’s not exactly a wide-ranging debate.
These fake groups are bad for democracy, which is why Common Cause is on the case.
These sorts of campaigns are dangerous for our democracy. They deliberately mislead citizens, and they deliberately mislead our lawmakers, who are charged with the difficult task of making sense of complex telecommunications policies. Corporations that already have significant economic clout and influence are trying to co-opt the voices of everyday citizens and think tanks, and use them to their own advantage. In the end, that practice dilutes the power of true grassroots and nonprofit advocacy.
It is therefore ironic that one group that might fit Common Cause’s definition of astroturf, ItsOurNet, flagged this report for my attention in an email. Like the groups profiled by Common Cause, ItsOurNet has taken out ads to promote their views on net neutrality, although the group maintains it hasn’t spent “millions and millions on advertizing each week like the anti-Net Neutrality forces.”
Like the groups cited by Common Cause, ItsOurNet doesn’t make clear in its ads that funding comes from some pretty big companies, including Amazon, eBay, Google, IAC, Microsoft and Yahoo! I will say that ItsOurNet does a far better job on its web site disclosing its corporate backing that do the other groups. But still, astroturf is astroturf and ItsOurNet describes itself as “a broad coalition of consumers, grassroots groups and businesses working together to preserve the Internet and Net Neutrality.”
How’s that any different from Hands Off The Internet, which bills itself as a “nationwide coalition of Internet users” which supports “public policies that ensure the broadest possible range of choices for consumers and businesses using the Internet?”
Common Cause is right about all this noise from supposed public interest groups and coalitions. But the misleading groups don’t exist only on the telco-cable side of the fence, even if there are more “coalitions” operating on behalf of cable operators and phone companies.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at August 10, 2006 03:37 PM