Campaigns

Pro-piracy interests have been organizing globally to head off and defeat future anti-piracy legislation (like SOPA/PIPA), IP treaties (ACTA) and property rights enforcement, all while claiming to represent "the Internet" and all its users, when they do not. They collectively represent pro-piracy special interests.

They hijack popular political buzz-words like "Internet Freedom" and "innovation," to distract people from their fringe anti-property views and to simulate broad mainstream political support.

("Astroturf" in a public policy context connotes artificial grassroots, simply proclaiming to be something one is not in order to gain broader political support.)

This analysis spotlights the political interests and strategy of global pro-piracy interests. It also answers several key questions:

• What unites pro-piracy special interests?
• Who are the top ten Internet astroturf 3.0 players?
• If this is Internet astroturf 3.0, what was 1.0 and 2.0?
• What's the main difference with Internet astroturf 3.0?
• What are the main political techniques of Internet astroturf 3.0?
• What are Internet astroturf 3.0's three grand deceptions?

FreePress' campaign director, Tim Karr, continues to overuse its main political tactic of demonizing anyone that disagrees with FreePress' goal of ridding the world of free market capitalism and property ownership.

FreePress' play book is all about the politicization of issues -- dividing people, not uniting them.

The PCCC's handling of its own 0-95 net neutrality record in the mid-term election is a political case study of what happens when one ignores The First Law of Holes: When in a hole, stop digging.

Even though the PCCC has no one else to blame for digging itself into a big hole by mass emailing their list of 95 candidates who pledged support for net neutrality to reporters and bloggers prior to the election, the PCCC appears intent on continuing to dig their political hole deeper.

What do the mid-term election results mean for the FCC?

First, FreePress' version of net neutrality was completely repudiated in the election.

• Every single one of the 95 House and Senate candidates that FreePress/PCCC got to publicly pledge support for net neutrality -- lost their election in the mid-terms. Yes, that is indeed a 0-for-95 record here.
• The FCC should take note that the main "political" driver behind trying to make net neutrality into a national grass roots issue, FreePress/PCCC/Moveon.org, could not get the issue to register on the election radar screen, and where ever they did attract a candidate endorsement of their position, they failed 100% the time in having that candidate get elected.

Second, most of the FCC's business is not political or partisan -- and it need not be. (The 1996 Telecom Act was almost unanimous. And the overwhelming majority of FCC decisions are 5-0.)

Radical supporters of net neutrality have chosen to try and make the mid-term election a national referendum on net neutrality.

• FreePress' close ally, The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) has created a website NetNeutralityProtectors.com, which lists 95 House and Senate candidates that have taken their net neutrality pledge: "I believe in protecting net neutrality -- the First Amendment of the Internet..."

To make it easier to track the electoral performance of candidates who have take the PCCC/FreePress net neutrality pledge, here is a Net Neutrality Election Tally Sheet, listing the 95 candidates so that one can print out and record the outcomes on election night.

To put this preview in perspective, net neutrality supporters have been able to get:

• Only 10 candidates in the 37 U.S. Senate races to take their NN pledge -- all Democrats; and
• Only 85 candidates in 435 U.S. congressional races to take their NN pledge -- again all Democrats.

To get a handle how the PCCC/FreePress net neutrality supporters are projected to fare on election night Tuesday, the Tally Sheet includes the election predictions of the non-partisan independent Cook Political Report:

In another example of how many have overstated that the U.S. is falling behind the world in broadband, the OECD ranks the U.S. #1 in broadband Internet access to schools, with 97% of all American primary and secondary schools having broadband Internet access per the latest OECD data.

• A tip of the hat to Rob Atkinson of ITIF for publicly surfacing this interesting  factoid at Randy May's Free State Foundation forum last Friday on "Broadband Nation: Where does the U.S. really rank in the broadband rankings?"

This data suggests that lack of broadband access may not a major reason why American students test lower than students in many OECD countries.

For more data and studies on why the U.S. is not falling behind the world on broadband click here.

Sometimes an analysis is so outstanding, all you can say is "Read it!"

Anyone who considers themselves religious should read Red State's illuminating and shocking post, which documents an anti-Christian discriminatory bias by Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig and his extremely close ally -- Google.

• "Obama and Google's mutual advisor: Jesus is gay; wears a diaper and gets run over."

WARNING: Christians will find the one-minute-fifty-second video that Mr. Lessig shows to a laughing Google audience, sacrilegious, offensive, and disturbing.  

I am attending David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect Conference today as a very very small minority of broadband industry folks.

In listening to a panel on politics and the web, my ears perked up when Donna Edwards, who defeated Rep. Al Wynn (MD) in a democratic primary, admitted that only one citizen of the thousands she met going door to door during the campaign -- actually asked her about net neutrality.  Very interesting.

All the bragging by Matt Stoller of Open Left and other net roots suggested that Edwards win was a win for net neutrality at the net roots.

The reality is now shared from the candidate that net neutrality was not at all on the minds of voters in Maryland.

• Once again, the net roots have overstated their power and impact to look more powerful than they really are.  

Professor Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality" is reportedly now advocating "law breaking" to advance the "information commons" agenda, which believes Internet infrastrructure, spectrum and content should be publicly owned and not privately owned.  

• Communications Daily quoted Professor Wu on March 11, 2008:
  • "To move things along, unlicensed users should start occupying unused spectrum for wireless broadband, Wu said: "You gotta start somewhere, and it always starts with law-breaking.""
• My experience is that Comm Daily is careful to accurately quote people and if Professor Wu did not to clarify his remarks, we can assume them to be accurate. I also have not seen a clarification of this after two more publications. 
• I would also like to extend the courtesy to Professor Wu to be able to qualify his remarks that they were meant to be flippant, or a joke, or that he really didn't mean to call to publicly encourage people to break the law.
  • He could resolve this issue with a simple blog post.  

That said, it is very troubling to any public civility minded person who believes in the rule of law and respect for property, that such a prominent person as Professor Wu (who coined the term net neutrality, and who proposed Caterfone open access rules for the 700 MHz auction) would advocate "law-breaking" to advance his political agenda.