AT&T's Hilarious and Shameless Astroturfing (or Sock-Puppeting)

Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet at 1:24 PM on October 20, 2009.

AT&T has a really good (and democratic) plan to undermine FCC regulations in support of net neutrality: pressuring employees to post anti-regulation talking points on an FCC website while hiding their affiliation to the cable company. Grassroots! 

In an internal company memo obtained by Free Press, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President James Cicconi writes "We encourage you, your family and friends to join the voices telling the FCC not to regulate the Internet. It can be done through a personal email account by going to www.openinternet.gov and clicking on the "Join the Discussion" link." (italics added).

That should totally work, because ordinary citizens are often inspired to make impassioned pleas about ISP regulatory policy.

The memo also helpfully provides talking points "in addition to your own thoughts," such as:

America's wireless consumers enjoy the broadest range of innovative services and devices, lowest prices, highest usage levels, and most choices in the world. Why disrupt a market that's working so well?

An oligopoly totally lacking in transparency? Really, why mess with perfection?

 Free Press has a nice-take down of some of the other "suggestions":

Some of the talking points are hard to read without rolling your eyes.

For example: Cicconi suggests that employees write that Net Neutrality will “jeopardize efforts to deliver high-speed Internet services to every American.” Yet he’s unable to provide any rationale for this claim, other than saying that universal access is a goal that “can't be met with rules that halt private investment in broadband infrastructure.”

Really?

AT&T is loath to mention that it made considerable network investment when it had to abide by Net Neutrality conditions, and invested considerably less when it didn’t.

As a requirement of its 2006 merger with BellSouth, AT&T agreed to operate a neutral network (by adhering to the four principles of the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement as well as a fifth principle of nondiscrimination) for two years.

AT&T’s network investments increased immediately following the imposition of the Net Neutrality merger condition and continued to rise over the two years of the merger agreement. When the neutrality condition expired on Dec. 29, 2008, the company sharply reduced its investment.

So when Cicconi says that Net Neutrality means no buildout, the opposite is true.

By pressuring the company’s employees to pose as average citizens and post AT&T talking points, Cicconi is asking them to be doubly deceptive. Not only are they asked to hide their true identities but also to spread misinformation on behalf of a company that seems to be getting more desperate by the day.