"This is not a rate increase, this is about fair pricing for everyone, seriously."

It’s always awful when you wake up with a bad taste in your mouth.  That’s the flavor of industry hacks and sock puppets who spent a good part of yesterday and last night on the attack against Rep. Eric Massa and your consumer interests.  Part of this battle is about engaging those who claim to represent consumers, but actually turn out to be paid by a lobbyist firm or “think tank,” usually located either in or near Washington, DC.  They are typically unwilling to disclose that involvement.  I’m not.  When called out, the typical response ranges from silence to ‘I would be saying the same things even if I didn’t get paid by them.’

Sure they would.

Consumers need to be particularly vigilant about the Say for Pay crowd of sock puppets that arrive in quotations in articles that attack common sense pro-consumer positions, or in the comments  below an online article.

Now you may be asking what in the world is a “sock puppet.”  Craig Aaron at Free Press explains:

Sock puppets, for those unfamiliar with the creatures commonly found inside the Beltway, are mouthpieces who rent out their academic or political credentials to argue pro-industry positions. These pay-to-sway professionals issue white papers, file comments with key agencies, and present themselves to the press as independent analysts. But their views have a funny way of shifting depending on who’s writing the checks. (To be clear, at Free Press we take no industry money.)

Sock puppets and astroturf groups go hand in hand.  If you remember, we’ve exposed a number of these groups that claim they are standing up for consumers, but in reality are paid to sit down and absorb their industry backer’s talking points.  The snowjob that typically follows claims that if you do the pro-consumer common sense thing, such as not allowing Internet Overcharging schemes to rip people off, you’ll destroy the Internet, America, and maybe even freedom itself.  Besides, just look at the “expert credentials” of our guy telling you that.

When you boil it all down, sock puppets are people who feel morally fine with taking money for being willing to assume any position you want them to take.  It’s vaguely familiar to another profession that’s been around for a very long time.  One just has better office space than the other, and better business cards, too.

If you want to explore a perfect example of sock puppetry at work, with a group trying to get public taxpayer money to benefit big telephone and cable companies with few strings attached, check out Craig Aaron’s article on the subject this past January.

In Stop the Cap!‘s history, we’ve debated a representative from Nemertes Research who refuses to disclose who pays for their industry research reports that conveniently say exactly what the telecommunications industry’s positions are on the broadband issues of the day.  We’ve questioned a group that claims that “openness” or “neutrality” of the Internet is irrelevant, and called out the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research (you gotta love the name — it’s a delicious consumery-sounding word salad… with special interest croutons sprinkled all over the top), who applauded Internet Overcharging as a great thing for customers, except they were packed with lobbyists to really satisfy big telecom interests.

Readers of this site should be well-qualified to engage industry propaganda and consumer misconceptions about the fairness of Internet Overcharging schemes.  You’ve gotten the information you need to effectively educate consumers and expose the sock puppetry.  The entire reason this group exists is because we realized the fight is not over, and we’d need an army prepared to combat the Re-education campaign we were promised back in April.  The battle is fully engaged now, and I’ve been happy to see many of you joining conversations on other sites where misconceptions and sock puppets prevail, and helping to educate consumers with facts, not focus group-tested propaganda.

We need many more of you to do likewise.  If your local newspaper runs an article on Rep. Massa’s bill, or our issues, take a look at the article online and look at the comments being left by readers.  Encounter misconceptions?  Help educate people.  Discover a sock puppet browbeating consumers for standing up for common sense reform of the broadband industry?  Defend the consumer’s point of view and don’t allow anyone to berate you with smug, fact-free answers.  Most are unprepared to respond with actual evidence to back their views, just a load of industry rhetoric and evidence-free claims they have expertise you don’t.

I encountered this myself last evening, when an industry sock puppet alternated between allusions that people who oppose Internet Overcharging were content thieves and pirates or were a “special interest group” that wanted someone else to pay more for their usage.  A few minutes of basic research revealed a fact he failed to disclose — he’s employed by a Washington, DC-based think tank, appropriately located on K Street in Washington.  The same group that tangled with Free Press’ Aaron, who rightfully objected to their proposal to hand $30 billion in taxpayer money over to big telecom for, essentially, anything they want.  They don’t call them “K Street” lobbyists for nothing. Stop the Cap! reader Michael was there as well, also asking for the evidence he couldn’t produce.

Here comes the Astroturf

After a few rounds, the debate ended over his insistence his employer wasn’t located on K Street at all.  Wow.

Moving forward to industry hackery, which is more or less the same thing, only more direct, the opposition was predictable and transparent.

The American Cable Association, which is made up primarily of smaller, independent providers who likely are too small to even face scrutiny by this bill told Multichannel News:

“Consumption-based billing plans will give consumers the ultimate control over how much they spend each month for their Internet access. Rep. Massa’s bill would have a chilling effect on broadband operators offering these types of consumer-friendly options,” said ACA president Matthew Polka in a statement. “During his Senate confirmation Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell noted that Americans today are watching a staggering 17 billion online videos each month, a use of the Internet that he said is growing at 16% per month. With these increases coming, Internet usage payment models will allow broadband providers to better manage their networks by imposing higher costs on the heaviest users who often are the ones responsible for slowing speeds for all users on the Internet.”

ACA represents small and medium-sized cable operators. At its convention last month, ACA members made clear to reporters that consumption-based billing was definitely in their future.

Of course, when consumers empower themselves to verify these claims, we discover the manufactured “panic attack” over broadband growth and the “consumer-friendly” choice of overcharging people for their accounts, is not borne out by the staggering profits earned by the industry based on the current pricing model, especially as bandwidth costs continue their rapid decline (along with the investments many companies make to ‘better manage their networks.’)

As we’ve learned, this is much more about managing high profits and investor return, and controlling the threat of online video from eating into the cable industry’s cable TV package business.

At least the ACA is consistent.  They always leave the consumer out in the cold.

Broadband Reports, which has been around far longer than most, has years of experience in identifying what’s fact and what’s fiction.  They pick up on AT&T’s response:

AT&T, who’s conducting metered billing trials in both Beaumont Texas and Reno, Nevada, was quick to respond when asked for comment. “The Free Press Solution advocates for a radical and unprecedented government mandate that will demand that consumers have only one all-you-can-eat pricing model for Internet services,” says the carrier. “Free Press prefers that grandma – who simply wants to download their grandchildren’s online photos a few times a month – to pay for the heavy-using teenager who is downloading HD movies.”

The argument that light users (grandma) “cross subsidizes” heavier users is a familiar — and incorrect — talking point. Taken to its logical conclusion, “grandma” should be paying $3 a month for bandwidth — a service tier you’ll surely never see AT&T offer. Likewise, if AT&T was truly only interested in managing heavy users, they could target them specifically by migrating them to business class tiers or by instituting a high cap only those users would hit. Instead, these metered billing efforts are aimed at impacting all users.

Again, regardless of the ocean of carrier rhetoric on this front, the push toward metered billing isn’t about the users of today, it’s about nickel and diming the Internet video users of tomorrow. Should users begin getting TV content online and find that subscribing to AT&T U-Verse wasn’t necessary, AT&T then has a way to ensure that they can offset this lost revenue with bandwidth surcharges.

The push is primarily focused on pleasing investors, who likewise see the protectionist aspect, but also adore the idea of consumers paying more money for the same product — a product that’s getting incrementally cheaper to supply. There’s a huge push for this coming from the investment community, and as we predicted, the industry’s giants are going to spend millions on farmed data, lobbyists and public relations in order to get their way.

When weighing who actually represents consumers more fairly, Free Press or AT&T, it’s a debate that ends before it gets started.  Free Press doesn’t take a penny of industry money and advocates for consumers and wants faster, cheaper, and more competitive broadband.  AT&T -IS- industry money, which it gives to astroturf groups, wants to accept government money to construct broadband networks and, hopefully, impose Internet Overcharging schemes on them, and has a track record of opposing Net Neutrality and competition, as several communities working towards municipal broadband have come to learn.

Grandma’s wallet is safer with the Free Press.  AT&T wants to take out all of the cash for her own ‘best interests’ and then hand it back, empty.