Posted on 10/20/2009 2:16:19 PM PDT by steve-b
An AT&T executive has asked employees to post opposition to net neutrality rules being considered by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on an FCC Web site using their personal e-mail addresses, prompting accusations of unfair advocacy by an opposing group.
The AT&T letter, sent this week by Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, asks employees to go to OpenInternet.gov and use a personal e-mail address to join the discussion forum there.
The letter then gives five talking points that AT&T employees can use to argue against net neutrality in the days leading up to Thursday’s FCC meeting, in which the agency is expected to take the first steps toward developing formal net neutrality rules.
The letter is a "kind of astroturfing," the act of creating fake grassroots opposition to an issue, said Tim Karr, campaign director for Free Press, a media reform advocacy group and net neutrality supporter.
"Coming from one of the company’s most senior executives, it's hard to imagine AT&T employees thinking the memo was merely a suggestion," Karr said in a blog post.
The letter is asking AT&T workers to be "sort of deceptive," Karr added in an interview. "He’s asking them to regurgitate talking points that are at best debatable."...
(Excerpt) Read more at macworld.com ...
Isn't this what 0bama is accusing Fox News of?
Good for AT&T. Net Neutrality sucks.
“Good for fraudsters” is a DU attitude, not an FR attitude.
Yeah, fighting fair will work with this thugocracy administration. /s
Isn’t the name net neutrality really a push to slow down surfers from accessing unpopular view points?
So what?
Go At&T
Obammer can’t have all the fun.
Nope; you have it ass backwards.The concept of Network Neutrality has unfortunately been misunderstood by many conservatives, libertarians, and other champions of the free market. That's too bad, because the free market essence of the Internet is exactly what would be lost without Network Neutrality.The large telecoms, some politicians and a number of conservative pundits have characterized the push for Network Neutrality as a left-wing attempt to stifle innovation and put government bureaucrats in control of the Internet. Well, it's not. Through my work with Gun Owners of America, I am demonstratively a lot further to the right than they are....
The real problem is that we are under a distorted market from the get-go. Government is setting the rules. The result has been a government-supported oligopoly. We are lucky that those controlling physical access to the Internet have been forced to give every purchaser of bandwidth equal access -- it doesn’t matter whether Gun Owners or the Brady Center is purchasing a T-1: all T-1 purchasers pay the same for the same level of service....
But people are going to build new Burger Kings along the highways. Suppose, however, that AT&T owned I-95. And that they inked an exclusive deal with Wendy's. Or bowed to pressure from food Nazis and said no burgers at all from Florida to Maine.
What we think of as the free market nature of the Internet is only possible because the oligopoly has been forced to keep its hands off of what actually gets done with the infrastructure they control....
--Craig Fields, director of Internet operations, Gun Owners of America
Glenn Beck is discussed the devil in the details of Net Neutrality just now.
Broadband Internet access is not a right. Net Neutrality seeks to make it an entitlement.
Net Neutrality seeks to implement social justice. (i.e. capitalism is bad)
Net Neutrality seeks to control Internet content. When the government wants to invest 7.2 billion, they’ll seek to regulate and control content in an effort to “benefit the public interest.”
Government control of the Internet is bad. Don’t be fooled.
I thought Algore’s interenet tax already took care of that.
Welcome, AT&T. Soon we will all be enemies of the Obama state.
I have a problem backing anything that President Obama’s FCC appointees endorse!
Agree.... The concept of Network Neutrality has unfortunately been misunderstood by many conservatives libertarians, and other champions of the free market.
I'll go with the latter.
Yup...AT&T controlling what we see so they can charge us to use their programs is like Ford selling us a truck and banning us from buying Chevron, or Shell gasoline and forcing us to use only Texaco gas.
Or buying a PC and Microsoft saying we can’t use Word Perfect, Corel Draw, Photoshop or Dreamweaver, but must only use Microsoft Office to do our work.
If companies like AT&T and Comcast have their way we will be limited to browsing to and using those programs that they own, and allow us to go to.
Ed
Well there’s multiple facets to it. One is open access another is equal treatment.
People want their IP based networks to behave like its not IP based in terms of quality. Kinda hard to do with net neutrality.
A good example is VOIP. If a telco or cable company has their own brand of VOIP they can’t set it up so it’ll run better unless they make it so where their competitors have the same benefit. I think a cable company was having to deal with issues because they dedicated a portion of their traffic to deal exclusively with their VOIP. To which other VOIP providers demanded access to reserved bandwidth.
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