AT&T, Bell South, and Mike McCurry Set Up Fake "Grassroots Internet Preservation" Group

Free Press :

"No where throughout this propaganda do they identify the nation’s largest telecom companies as the money behind the production. Instead, they dress up www.dontregulate.org as an authentically amateur effort — complete with hand-drawn cartoons, a scraggly, counter-culture net-guy as protagonist and a David vs. Goliath subtext.

They frame the issue as pitting corporations against the people, the rich guy against you, and stifling bureaucracy against the free market. They even give the URL a “dot-org” tag to cover their corporate tracks.

They paint the SavetheInternet coalition as seeking drastic regulation of the Internet. In fact, this group of more than 500 organizations, bloggers, educators and small businesses is asking only that Congress preserve Net Neutrality, the guiding principle that has kept the Internet free and open since its beginning.

It is AT&T and BellSouth that are asking Congress to radically re-regulate the Internet by stripping Net Neutrality from the wires. It’s the largest phone and cable corporations — with their monopoly control of broadband access across more than 50 percent of America — that pose the biggest threat to the free and fair enterprise and democratic discourse.

Remember, these same companies have handed over to the National Security Agency the personal phone logs of tens of millions of ordinary Americans, in violation of their customer privacy agreements. And now they’re asking us to trust them with the Internet?"