Atrios, Juan Cole, and Steve Gilliard are all running ads on their blogs that say "Don't let the government regulate the Internet!" Those ads are paid for by AT&T and other telecommunications companies, using the alias of a fake grassroots group. It is regulation that assures "net neutrality" and creates a level playing field between independent content-providers (like this blog) and the big companies that brought you Fox News and Britney Spears. Ending regulation means no more level playing field.
Also, we've just found out these same TelCos who want to end the Internet as we know it have been selling our personal information to law enforcement agents.
It does seem like a disconnect that there could be a benign part of the government that regulates food and drugs and keeps competition alive in the marketplace and a malignant part of the government that spies on us.
I don't think that's much justification for taking the Telcos' money and helping them spread propaganda, though. It's a bit like the footage in Fahrenheit 9/11 of Al Gore banging the Senate president's gavel repeatedly, to keep the people who voted for him from speaking out about the fraud in the 2000 election he just "lost." Working against your own interests, as it were. Epecially since the issue is so confusing. Most people will assume that those bloggers want the government's "hands off the Internet."
thats true but then it makes it hard to bitch at the media when they wont run ads for whatever squirrelly reason they dream up. the blogs are perfectly capable of clarifying for their readership the position espoused in the ad, although i agree that the confusion wrought by such astroturf campaigns, upon what is already a convoluted issue, is worthy of scorn.
|
Atrios, Juan Cole, and Steve Gilliard are all running ads on their blogs that say "Don't let the government regulate the Internet!" Those ads are paid for by AT&T and other telecommunications companies, using the alias of a fake grassroots group. It is regulation that assures "net neutrality" and creates a level playing field between independent content-providers (like this blog) and the big companies that brought you Fox News and Britney Spears. Ending regulation means no more level playing field.
Also, we've just found out these same TelCos who want to end the Internet as we know it have been selling our personal information to law enforcement agents.
It does seem like a disconnect that there could be a benign part of the government that regulates food and drugs and keeps competition alive in the marketplace and a malignant part of the government that spies on us.
I don't think that's much justification for taking the Telcos' money and helping them spread propaganda, though. It's a bit like the footage in Fahrenheit 9/11 of Al Gore banging the Senate president's gavel repeatedly, to keep the people who voted for him from speaking out about the fraud in the 2000 election he just "lost." Working against your own interests, as it were. Epecially since the issue is so confusing. Most people will assume that those bloggers want the government's "hands off the Internet."
- tom moody 5-13-2006 12:49 am
thats true but then it makes it hard to bitch at the media when they wont run ads for whatever squirrelly reason they dream up. the blogs are perfectly capable of clarifying for their readership the position espoused in the ad, although i agree that the confusion wrought by such astroturf campaigns, upon what is already a convoluted issue, is worthy of scorn.
- dave 5-13-2006 2:32 am