Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2010 06:20:17 -0700 From: Craig Aaron Subject: RE: [ NNSquad ] The New McCarthyism of Google-Baiting Spreads Its Stain To: Lauren Weinstein Lauren, At risk of further prolonging this spat, I submit the following for the NN Squad list. I hope you will share it. I want to start by saying that if I have one regret about the essay I posted on Huffington the other day, it's that I didn't make it clearer that you have long been an advocate for the Internet and that, in general terms, we probably agree on what Net Neutrality should look like. When it comes to political tactics, however, we obviously don't see eye-to-eye. You wrote in your reply the other day that my post was "a strange way to treat your friends on key issues" - but that's exactly what prompted my missive in the first place. I couldn't fathom why someone like you who wants Net Neutrality would spend so much time attacking Google's critics rather than Google's actions -- when the latter pose a much greater risk to the free and open Internet. Et tu, Lauren? It's hard to be lectured on the "mind-set, methodologies, and rhetoric more commonly associated with the dark side of politics" by someone who just compared me to Joseph McCarthy. That's especially rich given how often my colleagues and I actually have been red-baited during this debate by the corporate mercenaries at places like Americans for Prosperity. I wouldn't dare compare that to HUAC, either. But when you've spent a couple nights featured on Glenn Beck's chalk board (and had your in-box fill up with real vitriol and even death threats), we can talk further about what is and isn't neo-McCarthyism. Others on this list have drawn comparisons in this dispute to abortion and even slavery. Whoa. Godwin's law suggests a reference to Hitler can't be far away. But since the list seems so interested in history, let's review some of the recent turning points in the Net Neutrality debate. Just a few years ago, there weren't too many people outside the participants on this list who had even heard of Net Neutrality. In 2006, Congress was getting ready to eliminate it forever. A lot of people mobilized back then to try to save the Internet. But if you had to pick one moment that whole year that turned the debate, it would have to be when Ted Stevens gave his speech about a "series of tubes." It wasn't the intellectual height of the debate. But before that speech, there was a bill moving through Congress to kill Net Neutrality. And after that speech, and the embarrassment it generated, that bill never again saw the light of day. Or look at 2007 when Robb Topolski caught Comcast messing with BitTorrent. That put an end to all of the "solution in search of a problem" nonsense, the AP jumped on the story, Free Press filed a complaint and the FCC eventually launched its investigation. But if you had to pick one moment that made Comcast's crimes a national issue, it wasn't blocking the King James Bible or even Comcast's lying about it. No, the turning point was when Comcast paid seat-fillers to cheer on cue at an FCC hearing. Was that the best reason to sanction them for their actions and deception? Of course not. But it was the thing that got attention, and after that the FCC couldn't just sit on its hands. When the Obama administration came into office, we took them at their word that Net Neutrality would be a top priority. When Julius Genachowski got the top job at the FCC, we were optimistic. And when he gave that great speech at the Brookings Institution last September, we were even more so. We thought that finally smart people who actually understood the Internet were in power. When they asked for input, we gave them thousands of pages to read and assumed they were reading it. We waited eagerly and patiently - and for the most part, quietly - for them to work out the details. But the Genachowski FCC didn't do anything except retreat from tough decisions and negotiate with themselves to water down their own proposal. It's not all their fault - the courts made things harder. (But Genachowski hasn't done anything about that, either.) And while we were waiting for all of these supposedly smart, well-intentioned people to deliver Net Neutrality, they started getting attacked. AT&T and Comcast and whoever else funded a bunch of astroturf groups and others to flood the FCC with objections and rile up Glenn Beck. They convinced hundreds of members of Congress - most of whom had nothing to say about this issue before AT&T and CWA came knocking with campaign checks - to write letters to the FCC. Now the FCC was really wavering. Nobody said this was going to be easy. But some of us hoped the FCC would step up, take on the big companies, and explain to the American public what was really going on here. Instead, the FCC thought it would be better to sequester themselves in a backroom with a few of the biggest players. Some of us objected to this deal being made behind closed doors. Some of the big players sensed a leadership vacuum and thought it was time they made their own rules. So Google and Verizon went public with their pact, and most Net Neutrality proponents hated it. It read like an almost complete capitulation to Verizon's agenda. Wireless networks were left completely unprotected. The protections on wired networks were watered down. The exceptions for "managed services" were a massive loophole that endangered what they called "the public internet." Oh, and they suggested the FCC would be better off as a toothless watchdog chasing complaints instead of making rules of the road for everyone. And, yes, it was worse because Google was involved. Google's commitment to Net Neutrality and dedication to the fight for the open Internet is often overstated. But for a lot of folks they represented the "other side" to the phone and cable companies in this debate. And the fact that they seemed to be living up to their "don't be evil" pledge and sticking up for the little guys on the Internet earned them even more credibility. Just for kicks, here's a quote from Eric Schmidt of Google in 2006: "Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody - no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional - has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay." So, yeah, fast forward four years to Eric Schmidt arm-in-arm with Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon announcing their scheme to build that two-tiered system and block those on-ramps, and some people felt more than a little betrayed. I'm searching for the right historical analogy here, and I keep coming back to Benedict Arnold. Remember him? Anyway, if you care about Net Neutrality and still had any hope the FCC might move forward with basic, baseline protections, then Google's flip-flop was a crisis. But it was also an opportunity. You see, it turns out a lot of people who thought this whole Net Neutrality thing had already been taken care of got upset. And others who found out about Net Neutrality for the first time were pretty upset, too. And they wanted to do something about it. The Google-Verizon pact backfired. Hundreds of thousands signed petitions, the blogosphere lit up about the issue, and a couple of hundred even exercised their First Amendment rights by holding up signs outside Google headquarters for an hour. (Google, to their credit, came out to talk with them and take their petitions they even tweeted about it.) Now not all of these people could debate the details of QoS or Diff-Serve, but they sure care about the Internet and its future. And thanks to them, the media started paying more attention than ever before. Go back and look at how many stories the major media were writing about Net Neutrality in July or any other month in the past two years. Net Neutrality certainly wasn't the No. 1 issue in the blogs, as it was two weeks ago. I for one happen to think that's a good thing: The more attention this issue gets, the harder it is for the FCC to make a weak compromise or do nothing at all. Sunshine, as the clich goes, is the best disinfectant. But not you, Lauren; you're aghast at the "Google-baiting." Look, nobody's expecting you to grab a "don't be evil" sign and start marching through the streets of Mountain View. That's not your role or to your taste. But to turn and attack those who do raise their voices - those who are trying to make Net Neutrality a kitchen-table issue - is destructive to the polices you claim to support. And I said so. But it's not about loyalty; it's about strategy. And it's about the reality that if advocates don't seize upon these fleeting moments of public awareness on complex but crucial political issues like Net Neutrality, they will lose every time. We will have to agree to disagree about the best tactics to safeguard Net Neutrality. Maybe this will all end in an acceptable compromise, but it's time for Net Neutrality advocates to start holding their ground and stop negotiating against themselves. That elusive middle ground, if it is ever found, certainly is nowhere near where Google and Verizon are standing. Compromise has its place, for sure, but done wrong it just leaves you compromised. Craig Aaron Managing Director Free Press :: www.freepress.net reform media. transform democracy. -----Original Message----- Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2010 1:11 AM To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org Subject: [ NNSquad ] The New McCarthyism of Google-Baiting Spreads Its Stain The New McCarthyism of Google-Baiting Spreads Its Stain http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000750.html Greetings. It's a truism that history tends to repeat itself. Sometimes this occurs in unexpected ways, and the rise of what I'd call anti-Google "New McCarthyism" is an object example of this particularly disappointing state of affairs. GOP Senator Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, reached the zenith of his career around a half century ago by turning "red-baiting" -- the use of public accusations of communist membership, communist influence, or even casual contact with "communist causes," into a practically religious zeal of character assassinations. While many of the individuals that McCarthy accused of communist ties of some sort -- however tenuous, historical, or innocent in nature -- indeed had such contacts, McCarthy, through his use of virulent exaggeration and demagoguery, purposely attempted to advance his agenda by fostering the fear of a vast and deeply dangerous communist conspiracy that in fact did not exist. McCarthy's career began to rapidly implode in 1954, with the relatively new mass medium technology of television playing a vital role in his downfall. A brilliant and brave commentary by CBS' Edward R. Murrow in March set the stage, and a later televised congressional hearing exchange between McCarthy and Army legal counsel Joseph Nye Welch -- where Welch accused McCarthy of having lost all sense of decency -- helped to push McCarthy out of the spotlight and into well-deserved oblivion. I found myself thinking of McCarthy's rampages -- and fall from grace -- while considering the dramatic recent escalation of reckless anti-Google rhetoric being spewed by some parties across a variety of venues. The use of Big Lie techniques and "astroturf" funding sources in the battle against Net Neutrality are now all too traditional, so not particularly surprising. But we seem today to have entered a "perfect storm" zone of exaggeration and hate being used as an anti-Google tactic by uncompromising pro-Net Neutrality factions -- and some elements of the "privacy intelligentsia" -- who have now deployed what could be termed "Google-baiting" techniques in some respects significantly like the red-baiting of decades ago. As someone who has been involved in privacy-related causes for many years, and who is personally a strong believer in Net Neutrality (and the founder of the Net Neutrality Squad ( http://www.nnsquad.org ), it's particularly "fascinating" to find myself the target of attacks by "pro-privacy" and "pro-neutrality" forces who are apparently unhappy about my unwillingness to "toe the party line" in respect to their uncompromising "Google is the designated enemy" agendas. The managing director of Free Press spent considerable verbiage in a recent essay ( http://bit.ly/aXiZzA [Huffington] ) declaring me a member of the "new enemy" of Net Neutrality. He condemned my attempts to find common ground in Net Neutrality debates, while ridiculing my opinion that the recent Google/Verizon Legislative Framework Proposal, despite some significant shortcomings, had the very positive effect of moving a long-stalled policy area forward and was to be congratulated as a serious, noteworthy effort ( http://bit.ly/bzRyXn [Lauren's Blog] ). I've addressed this attack in some detail previously, so I won't dwell on it here ( http://bit.ly/a0gP7B [NNSquad] ). I'm certainly not the only target of such attacks. Consumer Watchdog, which has been attempting to create a self-serving mountain over Google's accidental and harmless collection of Wi-Fi payload data ( http://bit.ly/google-wifi [Lauren's Blog] ), and is continuously pushing for an impractical and potentially privacy-invasive government-enforced "do-not-track" list, paid this week to display an obnoxious, misleading, and disgusting animation in New York City's Times Square, which seemed to portray Google's CEO Eric Schmidt as a child molester. Satire is one thing, but character assassination of the Senator McCarthy variety -- or any other kind -- is something else entirely. Consumer Watchdog could have spent that money far more usefully and honestly simply by providing meals for some of NYC's homeless. It is indeed sad to see persons and organizations with presumably laudable motives now resorting to the same sorts of toxic political tactics that have previously so inflamed mindless passions, and so decimated rational discourse across the world -- throughout the centuries in fact. Not only do these tactics -- by hardening positions and rejecting reasonable compromises -- stall forward positive motion on a range of important topics relating to the Internet, but they also serve to betray our basic humanity in the flame of unrestrained political opportunism. Perhaps these factions should be more pitied than censored. But riding as they are with some of the ghostly sensibilities of Senator Joe McCarthy and the specter of McCarthyism, they should certainly be very much ashamed of themselves. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com) http://www.vortex.com/lauren Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance): http://www.gctip.org Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz