There’s a debate in today’s Investor’s Business Daily between SavetheInternet.com’s Josh Silver and everybody’s favorite telco-funded talking head, Mike McCurry.

The former Clinton press secretary has squandered whatever credibility he once had by becoming a shill for AT&T and friends. He may have to make a buck, as he’s said before, but his sock-puppet arguments are wearing thin.

McCurry trots out the bogeymen of “government regulation” and “unintended consequences,” without ever convincingly explaining how consumers are supposed to benefit from giving his clients more control over what you see and do online.

But Silver, the executive director at Free Press, shows what failing to reinstate Net Neutrality really means for Web users:

Eliminating net neutrality will undermine innovation, investment and competition. It would take the decisions away from millions of users and puts [them] in the hands of a small cartel of telecom executives with a strong financial incentive to undermine the free market. For all their talk about “deregulation,” the cable and telephone giants don’t want real competition. They want special rules written in their favor.

More importantly, Silver makes the case for why all businesses, large and small, should be fighting for Net Neutrality now:

Spin doctors have spent countless millions on slick PR to convince us that [Net Neutrality is] a battle between corporate titans like Google and AT&T. In reality, the debate pits nearly every industry that uses the Web: banking, real estate, small-business associations, travel, search engines, retailers and gamers — to name a few — against the largest phone and cable companies.

It’s this unprecedented alliance – left and right, business groups and every major consumer organization, bloggers and librarians – that Congress won’t be able to ignore. McCurry can try to spin it differently. But he’s just spinning his wheels.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.-->