In one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in Washington, the Senate Commerce Committee’s web site seems to have been taken over by telco lobbyists. There’s a link on the home page that says “Senate Communications Bill” that jumps to a page that could easily be mistaken for material from one of those “astroturf” outfits promoting the bill’s passage.
This page provides a laundry list of the feel-good organizations that support the bill’s passage and provides a link to an appalling “brochure” that reads like it was written by AT&T. The brochure presents nuggets about why the telecom bill is a good thing and cites all the newspaper editorials that have come out against net neutrality regulations (no editorials that favor net neutrality, of course).
This brochure is nothing short of K Street collateral and appears to have been professionally designed.
I wonder what the Democrats on the committee, or those who oppose the bill anyway, think about this? It’s such a blatant display of pro-industry blather — on a Senate web site no less — and an utterly craven example of what many people already believe to be true, namely that politicians are in the pockets of industry.
As those who read IPD on a regular basis know, I wobble all the time on whether net neutrality regulations are a good thing, and tend to think the government’s involvement will screw things up. So my dismay at this, well, icky development doesn’t stem from some anti-industry stance. There is a lot of blather on the other side too; I wouldn’t want to see that stuff up on the Senate Commerce Committee web site either.
Update: Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge points out that the brochure has been pulled down from the site. But for posterity’s sake, Public Knowledge saved a copy. It’s here.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:22 PM | Print | Comments (0)AOL’s new strategy to give away its services at no cost met with tons of skepticism in the press and blogosphere. This CNN/Money piece has the headline “Free AOL: Too Little, Too Late?” Other headlines: “AOL giveaway doesn’t guarantee success,” “AOL freebies won’t guarantee success,” and on and on.
My absolute favorite item that casts a huge cloud of doubt over the last-ditch strategy is this piece by Mathew Ingram, which has the headline “AOL Joins the Party Five Years Late.” Mathew, whose writing is always fun to read, says:
If nothing else, the much-discussed decision to make America Online’s software and services completely free will result in a great laboratory experiment on a truly grand scale, an experiment that will hopefully answer this compelling question: Can a moribund online service — one whose very name has become synonymous with the word “lame,” one whose services are notoriously difficult to cancel, and one which has remained steadfastly a “walled garden” while all around it the benefits of advertising have become abundantly obvious - suddenly undergo a deathbed conversion and become an ad-driven online colossus after years of appearing to not really give a crap?Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:10 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) is busy trying to get the 60 votes he needs to shut down bill-killing debate on his telecom reform legislation and is meeting opposition from surprising quarters. According to this piece by the The National Journal’s David Hatch, Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum opposes bringing the bill up before the elections because he is caught in a tight re-election race and fears the public backlash if he votes for a bill that doesn’t contain net neutrality provisions.
More specifically, Santorum and other senators are worried about casting a sensitive vote on the inevitable pro-net neutrality amendment that will be introduced. They fear opposing such an amendment will leave them vulnerable to allegations that they helped destroy the Internet. On the other hand, if they don’t oppose the amendment, they risk losing valuable telecom industry contributions.
The upshot: Stevens’ bill stands a lower chance of being brought up for a vote in September, as the Commerce Committee chairman desires. The odds are now that the bill will be brought up in the shortened post-election session in November.
Meanwhile, Tim Lee has this op-ed piece in today’s New York Times that makes the case for how net neutrality regulations could harm competition. The editorial, which has obviously been edited for space and I suspect leaves out much of Tim’s analysis, cites “regulatory capture” and the ease of evading technological barriers as reasons why any net neutrality scheme will fail.
Update: Matt Stoller at MyDD tears into The New York Times for publishing Tim Lee’s piece. He takes a fair shot at Lee for his affiliation with what Matt calls a phony think tank, “The Show-Me Institute,” which, among other things, advocates the teaching of intelligent design in schools. He also takes a few fun but unfair shots at Lee for his name (Tim B. Lee, which sounds almost like Tim Berners Lee, one of the founders of the Internet) and his photo, which Matt finds “hilariously creepy.” But mostly he shames the New York Times op-ed staff for their willingness to accept submissions from someone who may or may not have the chops to gain such valuable exposure.
I’m stupified by the New York Times Op-Ed Editors, who have apparently decided that it’s their job to cut and paste any random submission from a ‘think tank’. Or maybe there just aren’t editors anymore, it’s all just interns due to cost-cutting.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:42 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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