RichardHarlos.com

Just seen on BoingBoing:

“Neil found a site called “HandsOff.org” that seems to be a grass-roots campaign from “a nationwide coalition of Internet users” against Internet regulation. On closer inspection, though: ‘it’s nothing more than a front for business interests that was set up by a PR company called the Mercury Group (1). If you’ve ever wondered why government seems so far removed from the will of the people, the existence of “astroturf” campaigns like this go some way to explaining why.’”

For those of you who may be wondering what this means, in short, you’re being manipulated!

The Mercury Group is a telco PR firm that masquerades as a grass-roots Internet community. The PR firm’s goal appears to be that of giving the appearance that there are a large number of regular Internet users who believe that keeping the Internet bandwidth fairly available to all is a ‘bad thing’. Nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion.

Instead, this fake site wants you to believe that we’ll all be better off if the telcos can charge some organizations for ‘priority’ bandwidth and access so, for example, if you’re visiting site ‘a’ and that site has paid extra fees to the telcos, you’ll get their content faster, whereas if you’re visiting site ‘b’ and that site has NOT paid said fees, their content will arrive more slowly to your computer.

Despite the garbage on this phony site, ‘net neutrality’ is what we’ve got… it’s what we’ve always had and it’s one of the things that makes the Internet the wonderful tool that it is: equally accessible to everyone, not just to the ‘big guys’ with the ‘deep pockets.’

For a quick intro in this issue, please view the 2m 39s Net Neutrality Video from PublicKnowledge.org. Additional views and resources can be found in John Unger’s post entitled Without Net Neutrality, Would Blogs Exist?

More in-depth information can be found in Wikipedia’s Net Neutrality entry.

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(1) From the Mercury Group’s page: “Proven practitioners of persuasive arts and science that achieve measurable results.