The sun is shining, small furry animals are scurrying about the yard, and overpaid lobbying shills for the cable industry are pretending to be “consumer interest groups” to convince Congress that tiered broadband rationing plans are good for everyone.

As part of the promised “education campaign” from Time Warner, Alex from Time Warner tweeted that he found this great article from a ‘consumer organization’ that thinks that tiered broadband and rationing your Internet connection is a grand idea for consumers.

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), conveniently pops up to challenge the Free Press campaign to ban usage caps.

You and your colleagues will very likely soon receive a petition from members of Free Press urging you to launch “an investigation of Time Warner Cable’s plans to impose an unfair penalty against Internet users.” The correspondence will be motivated in substantial part by a recent solicitation to its members containing misstatement of facts, by Free Press, regarding causes and effects of “metered” billing trials.

The occasion for the controversy follows: Time Warner Cable recently announced its intention to expand its (Beaumont, Texas, metered billing trial) to four more markets later this year. The company will restructure its rates into tiers each of which reflects a different usage level by a subscriber. There will be seven rate/service tiers (1, 10, 20, 30, 40, 60 and 100 gigabits with different speeds). The slowest, least bandwidth intensive tier (one gigabit per month with 768 kbps upstream and 128 kbps downstream) is likely to apply to about a third of TWC users and will be priced at $15 per month. The top end tier for “power users” (100 gigabits per month at 10 mbps downstream and one mbps upstream) would be priced at $75 per month. The incremental usage charge for all tiers would be $1 per gigabit over the tier limit.

The proposal and the reaction of Free Press and others have motivated substantial controversy, one result of which was the announcement by Time Warner Cable to postpone the trials pending continuation of its customer education process designed to provide better information to consumers about the details and implications of the plan. According to a company release yesterday, it is developing measurement tools that will permit consumers to monitor their use, thereby eliminating concerns that consumers will be billed for bandwidth usage of which they were unaware.

Ironically, the group’s open letter channels almost the precise position Time Warner has on this issue.  Coincidental? Or do we need to call A&E’s Paranormal State?

The American Consumer Institute’s mission, and this comes right off their website: “consumers’ interests are not satisfactorily represented the wide variety of advocacy and consumer organizations that often represent small subsets of consumers and special interests; ignore distant, collateral and unintended consequences of importance to consumers; and too often mirror advocates’ political views rather than an empirical analysis of consumers’ economic welfare.”  It’s a rhetorical frenzy, and someone is paying for it.

Time Warner's "Customer Education" Campaign Begins

Astroturfing refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen group or coalition campaigns that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms. ACI is rolling out the grass now.  The group has a notorious past, opposing consumer-friendly legislation that would stop anti-competitive practices in the marketplace.

ACI masquerades as a pro-consumer group, but in fact is loaded with folks that have a long history of ties to special interests and lobbyists, though those details are often missing from the online “bios.”  ACI also links to minor consumer groups, pro-industry websites, another well-known astroturfer — the Discovery Institute which helped promote the exaflood nonsense (the Internet is getting too full, log off), and even an insurance industry blog.  Consumer Reports this isn’t.

Back during the net neutrality debate, this same group came out of nowhere with a suspiciously well-funded opposition campaign.  That caused whiplash over at Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports:

We had no idea that net neutrality — the concept of preventing Internet providers from speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination — would be so devastating to consumers. Like nearly every other major consumer group, we here at Consumers Union have been under the impression that net neutrality would actually benefit consumers.

But there it was in black and white, based on a research report by a group called the American Consumer Institute.

Could all of us consumer advocates have been so wrong about this?

Turns out, not so much.

The contact name on the American Consumer Institute press release was Stephen Pociask. The name rang a bell with us, but we weren’t sure why.

But a quick Google search jogged our memory. Pociask is a telecommunications industry consultant and a former chief economist for Bell Atlantic, which these days is known as Verizon.

When Consumer’s Union went and looked up Pociask’s bio on the website, they found it quite impressive, but surprisingly there was no mention of his work as chief economist for Bell Atlantic. Go figure.

Our readers were all over it at the same time we were.

Brion pounced all over this “consumer alert” and actually tried to reason with the author, Larry F. Darby.

I request that you publish the raw data used in the studies to which you refer so they may be reviewed publicly as a scientific paper would be reviewed by others in the field before it is accepted and credible and realistic.

Brion, I wouldn’t wait by your inbox too long for that.  That’s because we’ve dealt with this group before.   Lee Drake, who has also been involved in fighting Time Warner usage caps, did what everyone in this fight needs to do — he checked it out.

Darby Consultants has been the mouthpiece for cable companies and telecommunications firms since 1988, testifying in anti-consumer, pro-telecom positions before Congress multiple times. In addition, he used to be VP of Telecommunications, Investment Banking Group to Lehman Brothers.  Now he’s is a paid gun for the telecom firms, and their main mouthpiece at congressional hearings. You wouldn’t know that based on the name of his not for profit. Interesting how it purports to represent the consumer.

After I suggested Brion take an even deeper look, he found lots more.

But it’s just not Lee and Brion saying it.  Savetheinternet.com, a pro-net-neutrality group, didn’t take long to dredge up:

I went to the ACI site to confirm. Pociask’s bio was posted by ACI, but surpisingly mention of his work as a telco’s chief economist was nowhere to be found.

How can that be? The American Consumer Institute claims that they do not accept any financial support from corporations. “We only accept assistance from individual consumers and consumer groups,” they claim. “The Institute depends on volunteers, particularly those with significant public policy expertise.”

I’m curious. Who might these contributing “consumer groups” be? And do THEY accept money from corporations. Also, if ACI isn’t paying their “volunteers,” who is?

A quick online check reveals that ACI’s Web site is actually registered to the same “volunteer,” Stephen Pociask, who still works in the telecom industry as a paid consultant.

ACI describes itself as “an independent consumer organization dedicated to improving the lives of American consumers.” But its list of experts includes people with deep ties to phone and cable companies.

Broadband Reports, which covers the broadband industry, was also able to effectively label this group, with its “absurdly misleading name,” as a classic example of a astroturfing in action.

The Re-Education Campaign Time Warner promised has begun.