Mike to Mike: Put Up or Shut Up
August 1st, 2006 by Tim Karr |
AT&T and BellSouth mouthpiece Mike McCurry has received a challenge that places his credibility on the line.
In a post at Techdirt, Michael Masnick challenges McCurry to put his money where his mouth is by agreeing to pay Google’s broadband bills. The challenge is a response to McCurry’s fact-challenged op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, in which he asserts that Google’s access to bandwidth doesn’t cost the company a dime.
“That’s a flat out lie,” writes Masnick. “Google pays tremendously large bandwidth bills, and the more they use the more they pay.”
McCurry’s argument is one of the many misleading talking points that he has spread as part of his “Astroturf” effort to discredit Net Neutrality. The Sun editorial mis-identifies McCurry as “co-chair of Hands Off the Internet, a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of technology, media and nonprofit organizations,” without informing readers of the telco money behind this grassroots façade.
Masnick slams the telcos and their anti-Neutrality lobbyists for “trotting out lies” in an effort to win over support for legislation that guts Net Neutrality’s basic guarantees of Internet freedom.
He takes particular exception to the oft-repeated lie that content providers don’t pay for serving up their data via the Web. “If McCurry is going to pretend Google ‘never [has] to pay a dime no matter how much bandwidth they use,’ let’s see him put up or shut up,” Masnick writes.
McCurry, the former White House spokesperson turned corporate sock puppet, has yet to come clean and respond to the challenge by paying Google’s bandwidth bills for the rest of 2006.
I doubt even McCurry has the bank account to cover that cost. So, here’s a compromise. Instead of coughing up the cash, McCurry might simply retract the many untruths he has spread since becoming a paid shill for AT&T and BellSouth.
What do you say, Mike?
