Telcos Seek to Deceive Bloggers with Cartoon

http://mediacitizen.blogspot.com/2006/05/telcos-seek-to-deceive-bloggers-with.html

Friday, May 12, 2006
Telcos Seek to Deceive Bloggers with Cartoon

Coming to a blog near you is a telecom-sponsored advertisement dressed up as
an underground cartoon. It's the latest in the ongoing campaign by large
phone companies to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public.

The cartoon is a product of a front group funded by AT&T and BellSouth. The
group, Hands Off the Internet, is headed by Mike McCurry, the former Clinton
Press Secretary who has been widely discredited for selling out his
integrity to become the telephone industry's spokesmodel.

McCurry's group is now attempting to buy its way into the blogosphere,
spending tens of thousands of dollars on a misinformation campaign against
network neutrality -- the principle that keeps the Internet free and open to
all.

The ad and the animation it links to are an example of Stephen Colbert's
"truthiness" in action. Telco giants cloak their real interests behind a
populist message that sounds plausible, while undermining the work of
genuine public and consumer advocates.

No where throughout this propaganda do they identify the nation's largest
telecom companies as the money behind the production. Instead, they dress up
www.dontregulate.org as an authentically amateur effort -- complete with
hand-drawn cartoons, a scraggly, counter-culture net-guy as protagonist and
a David vs. Goliath subtext.

They frame the issue as pitting corporations against the people, the rich
guy against you, and bureaucracy against the free market. They even give the
URL a "dot-org" tag to cover their corporate tracks.

They paint the SavetheInternet coalition as seeking drastic regulation of
the Internet. In fact, this group of more than 500 organizations, bloggers,
educators and small businesses is asking only that Congress preserve Net
Neutrality, the guiding principle that has kept the Internet free and open
since its beginning.

It is AT&T and BellSouth that are asking Congress to radically re-regulate
the Internet by stripping Net Neutrality from the wires. It's the largest
phone and cable corporations -- with their monopoly control of broadband
access across more than 50 percent of America -- that pose the biggest
threat to the free and fair enterprise and democratic discourse.

(These are the same companies have handed over to the National Security
Agency the personal phone logs of tens of millions of ordinary Americans --
a betrayal of their customer privacy agreements. Now, they want us to
entrust them with the Internet?)

Without Net Neutrality protections, companies like AT&T, BellSouth and
Verizon will swoop in to dismantle Internet diversity in favor of websites
that pay their tax for speed. Industry-supported legislation now before
Congress would hand over control of the Internet to these massive telcos,
allowing them to set up tollbooths along the onramps and exits of the
information superhighway.

Shoved to the margins will be the small businesses, open-source innovators,
bloggers, independent musicians, political organizers and everyone else who
can't afford the toll.

These Web outsiders and upstarts have been the lifeblood of the Internet.
Many are already creating their own animations and PSAs to call public
attention to AT&T and Verizon's Internet swindle, while coming to the
defense of Net Neutrality. While these homegrown videos don't have a
big-money ad buy behind them, they are spreading of their own volition
across the blogosphere.

This type of grassroots creativity wouldn't stand a chance under a regime
where the largest ISPs limit access to high speed Internet to the companies
that pay them the most.

McCurry's powerfully deceptive cartoon is a part of this telco scheme. It's
designed to convince bloggers and net users to support a plan that goes
against their best interests.

= = = = =
For a frame-by-frame debunking of the telco cartoon, visit
www.savetheinternet.com/=lie


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Anyone still using FAX?
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    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: New York Times Prints Nazi Cartoon (Naomi Ragen)
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    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)
  • Re: Anyone still using FAX?
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    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Anyone still using FAX?
    ... large Internet switching center vs. a large Telco switching benter), ... through multiple "hops" to get from source to destination, ... With the Internet you never really know which countries stuff goes ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Battle of the Planets--Unmasked
    ... Aside from the corney R2D2 robot, ... Now, thanks to the internet, we know the truth. ...
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