Telco Astroturfers Trolling Pro-Net Neutrality Blogs
It looks like astroturfers from a Virginia-based lobbying/PR outfit that calls itself "Hands Off the Internet" have been busy this week, posting the telco/cable company party line on various bloggers’ comments, including mine.
It surprised me that these people found my blog — I’m in favor of net neutrality, but I don’t blog about it much here, mainly because others do it much better than I could. I just happened to mention net neutrality in a quote from an unrelated NY Times article I quoted earlier in the week. They must have Technorati alerts set up for phrases like "net neutrality," and when they see someone post something with that phrase in it, they dump a bunch of nonsense in their comments.
You can see he (or they) are doing this on other peoples’ blogs by doing a web search for "HandsOffPlease".
The fact that the astroturfers are comment-bombing blogs is interesting not because of their dazzling rhetoric — they’re falsely trying to position anti-net-neutrality as a way to foster more internet innovation by removing the evil spectre of government regulation. The fact is that the industry is more interested in forcing government to step aside so telcos and cable companies can screw over consumers any way they want. If you want to start putting a quarter in a meter every time you download a video, I suppose that kind of "deregulation" is what you want. But if you want to keep paying for access to the net the way you do today, with a flat rate for a specified amount of bandwidth, then you’re pro-net neutrality, it’s as simple as that.
Even more interesting to me than the sloppy, intellectually dishonest rhetoric is the fact that the telcos are now paying somebody to troll the net and tell lies in bloggers’ comments. The telcos must believe that the blogosphere is a front in the net neutrality fight.
Of course the blogosphere matters. And why, exactly, is it illegitimate for me to be offering arguments in your comment section?
You haven’t demonstrated that I’m lying, you only assert it. By contrast, your “quarter in the meter” analogy is not representative of any model proposed for future Internet service.
Nor have you demonstrated that I’m astroturf — I said exactly who I represented in my first comment here yesterday. And I’ll also point out, yes there are telcos in our coalition, but as you can see from our website, the majority of our members are not ISPs.
I’m sorry this upset you so much, but I do at least appreciate you leaving the comments open.
I’m not upset. I just like to make sure that stuff that appears on my blog doesn’t go unexamined. I’m funny that way.
So you say that the majority of your members aren’t ISPs, which is fine, but I’d be more interested to know where does the majority of your funding come from.