Cable Lobbyists Pretending To Be Cool Digital Hipsters To Convince Youth That Net Neutrality Is Bad [View all]

[bananas]

Source: Consumerist

The fight for net neutrality has players from all corners amped up and joining in. Millions of individuals, as well as consumer advocacy groups, internet businesses, internet business groups, cable and telecom businesses, and their trade groups, have all been pressing the FCC toward one decision or another. But now there are some new groups wading in to the morass. They look like millennial, digital-savvy, pro-internet hispters — but their message is straight out of Comcast and AT&T’s playbook. So what’s going on?

ProPublica reports that a mysterious new ad campaign for the internet has popped up around the nation, but nobody can quite figure out who’s sponsoring it — or why.

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The installations are gathering messages of support for a campaign that calls itself “Onward Internet” (or, specifically, #onwardinternet because trendy). But who or what is Onward Internet?

That’s where the mystery comes in: nobody can quite figure that out. The closest message to an actual statement or policy position that Onward Internet has on their site is, the vaguely aspirational word salad, “Unbounded by limits, unfettered by rules, it’s everyone’s responsibility to ensure that the Internet continues to advance.”

That vaguely suggests that Onward Internet is interested in avoiding regulation, which would put them in the same bucket as ISPs like Comcast and Verizon. And while the production agency designing, installing, and manning the suggestion boxes won’t name their client, one person at the San Francisco location did blurt: “It’s something called the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.”

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Read more: http://consumerist.com/2014/10/09/cable-lobbyists-pretending-to-be-cool-digital-hipsters-to-convince-youth-that-net-neutrality-is-bad/