Glenn Beck Tries to Make a New ACORN by Attacking Net Neutrality & Changing the Definition of 'Freedom'

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

This may sound like the warning of an alarmist, but your ability to read the words I'm writing is already in danger, and the government has finally decided to decide whether or not it wants to do anything about it. Of course, Glenn Beck believes that decision is the end of the Internet as we know it.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether or not to begin a rule-making process on the issue of net neutrality.

What is net neutrality? Well, Science Progress has an informative but concise primer on the issue here that outlines the controversy and explains the stakes held by the government, communications companies and consumers:

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet; all content on the Internet is equally accessible, and once a person pays for access to the Internet, they alone get to choose how they use it... Internet users and their advocates generally favor net neutrality, while telecom companies see it as a threat to their use of their own property.

Or, as put even more simply by this About.com article: "Net neutrality means that Internet service providers and network owners concern themselves only with efficiently moving bits -- not with the content embodied by the bits."

The attempt to turn this into a conservative conspiracy theory has been tough, so defenders of Big Telecom had to call in the experts in whipping up unfounded fears: Glenn Beck and FOX News.

Think Progress, in their second notification of how Phil Kerpen is using Glenn Beck's show on FOX as a platform for the anti-tax and anti-government ideology of his group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), detailed how the team went after the issue of net neutrality.

It's really quite similar to healthcare and climate change tactics, in that Beck uses Americans' historic distrust of government intervention as a reason to let Corporate America run the show. Of course, there's a dose of Red Scare in there too, for good measure.

Kerpen has launched an all-out attack against the net neutrality advocates at Free Press -- a nonprofit, nonpartisan group promoting media diversity and access -- on his Web site. With the amount of times Kerpen and Beck referred to Free Press employees as Marxists and/or communists, one would think they're talking about ACORN (if you can stomach it, here are links to part one, part two and part three of Beck's show featuring Kerpen).

Aside from the fear mongering, there's a lot Beck doesn't understand about both freedom and the Internet, and it seems that Kerpen wants to keep it that way.

Kerpen portrays net neutrality as a way for the government "to decide what the future of the Internet looks like, if it looks much like the past 10 years where you have private competition and pretty much people can do what they want on the Internet, or whether we have a much, much heavier government hand."

In reality, net neutrality was the law of the land until 2005 under nearly century-old nondiscrimination rules, which originally enforced the freedom of telephone communications and also applied to Internet use.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling and several FCC decisions, that is no longer the case. The Internet is now a Title 1, or informational entity, instead of the telecommunications entity it was once classified as. Therefore, the rule that companies provide so called common carriage service (wherein phone companies could not refuse to connect calls made by customers using their competitors) no longer applied to the Internets.

In an interview with Washington Post tech writer Cecilia Kang Wednesday, Google's "chief Internet evangelist" Vint Cerf called that 2005 change a mistake (emphasis mine):

In the course of doing so, they made no distinction between the transport of bits on the Internet and the applications that sat on top of the network. In my view, as a technical architect, that was a mistake because the underlying layered structure of the Internet really does have a telecommunications component in it. That is where we went astray in terms of the openness of the Internet. During a regime where common carriage was the rule, the Internet flourished because it was possible to get access to the telecom infrastructure without consideration by telecom people as to what applications it was running.

Kerpen and Beck also crow about the free market and innovation solving access problems, but as anyone who has shopped for Internet providers can tell you, the big telecommunications companies have a oligopoly in place that ensures an absence of self-regulation.

Net neutrality deniers often use free market arguments combined with economic worries to claim that regulation of the telecoms would negatively impact innovation and economic growth. But a study released by Free Press Wednesday finds that "network neutrality may encourage modestly higher levels of investment in network infrastructure, and even higher levels of investment in the applications and content sector, which is the key driver of growth in the Internet access market itself." The report suggests that the main interest in defeating net neutrality lies in eliminating competition in the market.

Absent concrete arguments, Kerpen relies on the character assassination attempts that got him onto Beck's show in the first place. He created a bizarre flow chart that seems to put Free Press right in the middle of a socialistic tangle that includes one of Beck's favorite targets, former green jobs czar Van Jones as well as the FCC and other government entities.

I've included a click-able image of it on the right, and you should still be able to access a zoom-able version via Internet Freedom Coalition's Web site, though an AFP link via the Think Progress story has been disconnected or removed. It's worth a perusal if you have a few minutes. Especially entertaining is the fact that the chart labels Free Press' "Stop Big Media" project as an "Information Control Campaign."

On Beck's show, Kerpen directly attacked Free Press and others who support net neutrality, insisting, "They turn it upside-down by saying that evil corporations, phone and cable corporations are going to block what we can do or we can say."

During a press call organized by the Open Internet Coalition Wednesday afternoon, I asked Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner how he felt about Free Press being implicated in Beck and Kerpen's conspiracy theory. He seemed to think it is the other side that is turning the argument upside-down.

"Glenn who?" Turner replied wryly. He went on to dismiss Beck and others "at the fringe," whom he said are engaging in a "game of up-is-down-ism."

"Net neutrality is the First Amendment of the Internet," Turner said, noting that the initiative is ultimately about "promoting free speech. It's about more voices, not less voices."

So, I guess Turner would agree with Beck when the FOX host said of net neutrality, "America, you need to understand this. This is about your right to speak out."

Addressing my question of whether or not Beck's anti-net neutrality crusade will work, Turner said that the truth is on his side:

"Anyone who takes the time to study the facts will come to that same conclusion."

Still, I'm certain Kerpen will continue to call net neutrality "a Washington takeover" and "a solution in search of a problem." He insists that we've been "without a single significant incident of the kind of egregious behavior by evil phone and cable companies we're told require government intervention."

Yet there have been several instances of telecommunications companies interfering with access and content. When FCC Chair Julius Genachowski announced this fall in a speech before the Brookings Institution that we should "take steps to preserve Internet openness," he specifically refuted opposing arguments that the change represents unnecessary regulation:

We've already seen some clear examples of deviations from the Internet’s historic openness. We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to VoIP applications (phone calls delivered over data networks) and implement technical measures that degrade the performance of peer-to-peer software distributing lawful content. We have even seen at least one service provider deny users access to political content.

Paul Misener, vice president of global public policy at Amazon.com addressed the lack of egregious violations on the part of network operators during the Open Internet Coalition press call, calling the situation a "detente."

"Net operators are on their best behavior because they fear regulation," he said, adding that telecommunications companies have already "announced their plans to... restrict access."

Misener went on to call the extremely strong opposition to the FCC merely calling for a vote on whether or not they should consider net neutrality "scary."

Kerpen says that although the vote will only open the discussion to the first stage of rule-making, which is a public comment period, he wants to "make our case against the FCC even taking that first step down the road."

In response, Free Press basically told Kerpen and his ilk to chill out, saying of the opposition in a press release that "this is merely the beginning of a process, not the end. Their concerns are precisely the kind of issues that the FCC is prepared to debate and discuss in its rule-making. It should move forward as planned."

Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition said some in the coalition were dismayed by the "massive amount of lobbying" by telecommunications companies against net neutrality at the beginning of what he expects to be a "fairly long rule-making process." He also noted that the FCC is an independent agency "that's simply just trying to do its job."

But Beck sees everything with the word "federal" in the title as anything but independent, and insists that we somehow can't have freedom of speech and big government at the same time. Of course, "big government" is defined by Beck as something larger than the average bathtub, so maybe he's just talking about the freedom to get paid to climb up on his fear-mongering soap box every day, something he often confuses with the freedom of speech. So I guess he's just trying to do his job as well.

And should Glenn Beck ever lose his job at FOX News, I hope he realizes that net neutrality will preserve his ability to freely foam at the mouth online.

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Though that first step of deciding to decide on new net neutrality rules isn't expected until Thursday, the FCC has already begun the initial stages of soliciting opinions on the matter at a new Web site, OpenInternet.gov.

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