Suckered by Astroturf
November 20th, 2007 by tkarrUSA Today joins the illustrious list of news organizations to be taken for a ride by Astroturf.
In an article earlier this week, the paper’s media beat reporter David Lieberman writes that the end of the Internet is nigh. It will start crashing down around us by the year 2010, he adds, citing a recent “study” by Nemertes Research.
The Not-So-Real Thing
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The reason for our demise? We dastardly Net users have gone too far. According to Nemertes, we’re not just sending email and surfing Web sites but also downloading and uploading data rich files like video and music. Net Neutrality would further unleash this unruly mass upon the Internet grinding the network to a halt.
“The Web will start to seem pokey,” Lieberman writes, “as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers.”
Saving Us from Ourselves
The underlying message is this: By taking control of our own media, users are straining the Net to the limit. The only way to save the Internet from the coming “exaflood,” the report concludes, is to pay more federal money to the likes of AT&T and let them gut Net Neutrality protections so they can fix the problem.
The real problem here isn’t the looming demise of the Internet, but USA Today’s failure to question the motivations of its sources.
In their ceaseless efforts to become the gatekeepers to what we do online, the phone and cable companies funnel money to unscrupulous think tanks, which, in turn, churn out research, painting a picture of Internet Armageddon that can only be averted by giving the telcos exactly what they want: more money and control.
The Roots of Astroturf
In this case, Lieberman might have told readers that Nemertes is a research group funded by the Internet Innovation Alliance, an “Astrtoturf” group underwritten by AT&T.
“The IIA has been pushing the idea of a looming ‘exaflood’ for some time, with the primary goal being industry deregulation,” writes Karl at Broadband Reports. “The argument being that if these companies don’t get exactly what they want from lawmakers in Washington, the entire Internet collapses and we’re back to using soup cans and string.”
The USA Today story leaves readers with the impression that Nemertes reached its conclusion for the good of the public interest and not simply by following a script that was pre-ordained by the telcos.
Digging Beneath the Surface
Lieberman might also have cited the several other reports and studies that claim the opposite.
Analysts at the D.C.-based market research firm TeleGeography, call “foolhardy” the idea that an exaflood “is going to break something or kill something.” Video traffic and demand growth have been accounted for, he told CIO Insight, and “the network operators know how to scale.” TeleGeography research shows average global utilization of core Internet capacity in mid-2006 was only 34 percent, with peak utilization of 47 percent of available capacity.
Greg Collins, director of network and data center engineering for Earthlink Inc., added, “I don’t see anything specific in the way of capacity problems today, and my job is to manage capacity and growth in our network.”
Recent research notes that investment in backbone upgrades is exploding, with just about every network operator already working on upgrades or planning to do so in the next year or so.
Recent figures from Infonetics Research find that telecom global capital expenditure will exceed $220 billion in 2007. “Carriers are obviously not short of money, but rather than spend it on new infrastructure, many are looking at less capital-intensive strategies to reduce the strain, such as bandwidth shaping,” writes Dave Bailey of ITWeek. “This is carrier-speak for putting the brakes on your broadband connection, which is unlikely to go down well with most customers.”
Michael Masnik of Techdirt sums it up: “If there’s real demand for more capacity, there will be business models to support it, whether or not network neutrality is in place.”
Duped and Duplicitous
These types of studies often boil down to pure posturing and polemic against Net Neutrality, bought and paid for by AT&T. When researchers stumble across inconvenient points, such as the current boom in infrastructure investment, they dismiss them in favor of doomsday scenarios and call for an end to the one rule that allows online users to innovate without permission.
USA Today is not alone. Reporters and editors from the New York Times, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal to Xinhua have been snared in Astroturf , taking at face value data from coin-operated research groups without digging into their bank accounts to sniff out the payola.
Journalists should know better. These corporations claim that lawmakers should grant them control of Internet to safeguard the best interests of all Americans. But since when was AT&T elected to determine what is best for us?
November 20th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
[…] the Internet: Suckered by Astroturf. Techdirt: Death Of The Internet Greatly Exaggerated (By Those Who Stand To Benefit). von markus […]
November 21st, 2007 at 7:00 am
[…] Well, its all bunk! Why? Tim tells us why… […]
November 21st, 2007 at 7:30 am
Hi there,
As the authors of the study under question, we’d like to respond to a couple of points in your “Suckered by Astroturf” post.
First, we’d suggest that you arrive at your news from the actual source itself, rather than from second or third-hand reports. It’s posted online here.(http://www.nemertes.com/ii). We’ve provided a forum for comments, debate, and additional discussion below. Comments will be moderated for tone only (no ad-hominem attacks, no vulgarity), not for content.
You will find that counter to your assertions here, we are not claiming that “an exaflood is going to break something or kill someone”–in fact we say in so many words that this is not the case. (See page 50: “Does the Internet ever break? In a word: NO.”)
Nor do we claim that the backbone is in trouble–on the contrary, we explicitly state otherwise, early on (See page 7: “Core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support any conceivable demand”). We do have concerns about access capacity. We clearly articulate our dependencies and assumptions on which those concerns are based throughout, and we welcome increased data that will help us refine our projections.
Second, we dispute your characterization of the study’s funding. Our research is independent, not commissioned. For more insight into our funding structure, please review our FAQ (http://www.nemertes.com/ii_faq) Interestingly, one of the primary services we offer our clients is guidance on effectively negotiating with service providers to lower their bills–which would rather appear to refute your contention that we are controlled by carriers.
Finally, we dispute in the strongest possible terms that we have a particular agenda to promote. We are professional researchers, with backgrounds in computer science, operations, and decision support. We represent a range of political beliefs and perspectives, and take care to separate our politics from our professional work.
We are well aware that our findings can be used by anyone with an agenda to promote that agenda. As the old saying goes, the best lies contain a grain of truth.
We have no interest in promoting lies or propaganda, and we would hope that you feel similarly. We are committed to openness and honesty, and we hope that you feel likewise.
Again, we urge you to validate your facts, and provide any substantive criticisms of our study or methodology. We hope that you share our commitment to the truth, independent of ideology or propaganda.
Sincerely, Nemertes Research
November 21st, 2007 at 8:35 am
Thanks for writing Johna. The points of my post are these:
1. Journalists too often cite research by groups without revealing possible conflicts of interest that would impugn the integrity of the findings. Despite your claims of autonomy, Nemertes is funded by telecommunications companies with a clear policy agenda. The USA Today report at the very least should have flagged this.
2. The research sector is awash with special interest money. One corporate rationale for funding research such as yours is to influence outcomes that advance their policy objectives. Too often researchers play along, churning our “studies” that please their sponsors. Like any other business, supply is tailor-cut to meet demand.
Nemertes woos corporate clients to the extent that it helps you pay salaries and keep your lights on. Claims that you’ve erected a firewall between your marketing and research departments are laudable. But a lot of that credibility evaporates when you hide the names of your corporate sponsors. Why no Nemertes Web page that lists these? I have scoured your site map and found none.
The Nemertes report indeed claims that the Internet’s backbone won’t come crashing down. But your release to the press is considerably more shrill. The headline of the Nemertes press release screams that user demand threatens to “outpace network capacity by 2010.” The subhead and lead sentences warn of a coming “exaflood” which will stifle Web innovation — mimicking language used by telco shills to justify calls for discriminatory network management.
Your release then quotes two noted shills, Larry Irving and Bruce Mehlman, from the telco front-group Internet Innovation Alliance without adequately clarifying the relationship between IIA and Nemertes.
Irving resorts to the same old scare tactics, warning of an overwhelmed Internet. This line plays into the hands of IIA’s larger goal: industry re-regulation (not deregulation as they claim) that transfers resources and network “management” to the same companies — such as AT&T — that fund Irving and his cohorts.
Mehlman — who made a seamless transition from Bush’s top telecom official to a job as an uber-lobbyist for the phone companies — calls for the “right tax, commercial and policy environment.” A cursory review of Mehlman’s telco-studded resume makes it more than clear where he stands on such policy and whose interests he puts first.
Nemertes is undoubtedly aware of the IIA’s Astroturf agenda. By featuring Irving and Mehlman so prominently in your PR, you are complicit in furthering it.
You claim in your FAQ that “setting policy is out of scope for us and our organization,” that Nemertes has “no agenda or presumed outcome behind the research.”
But, in the face of the evidence cited here and elsewhere, there are considerable grounds for skepticism.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:03 pm
[…] ähnliche Hinweise gab es zuvor schon bei Save the Internet, wo eine vergleichbare journalistische (Nicht-)Leistung zu dieser Studie bei USA today kritisiert […]
November 21st, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your detailed response. I appreciate your willingness to engage in open dialogue, since I think we can agree that openness is the best policy.
In that spirit, I believe there continue to be some inaccuracies in the post. Hopefully the additional insights below will help to clarify those.
Regarding the points you raise, you say:
1. “Despite your claims of autonomy, Nemertes is funded by telecommunications companies with a clear policy agenda”.
Yes, we count carriers among our client base, and carriers tend to have agendas. No argument on either point.
However, you extrapolate from that to an implication that we are not autonomous.
That’s incorrect, for the following reasons:
First, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, we serve a broad base of clients, with wildly diverse agendas and perspectives. Telecommunications companies represent fewer than 10% of our clients. Among the remaining 90%, the single most signifcant group of clients are the IT departments of businesses like law firms, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, financial services firms, and the like.
To the extent that these clients have “telecommunications agendas”, they are to reduce their phone bills and find alternatives to traditional telcos (70% tell us they are searching for alternatives to traditional telcos). Our research services help them do that.
The point, again, is that we provide research to a broad range of clients with wildly diverse agendas and perspectives. Our clients’ agendas are their own, and they generally conflict with each others’.
2. You point out that the research industry is awash in special interest money. Again, no argument there (though I really wish you were wrong).
But this is different from drawing the conclusion that if researchers are paid, their research is therefore “not independent”.
By that standard, there would be no research conducted anywhere, by anyone, ever.
Academic researchers are, after all, funded by their institutions and the government (which have their own agendas).
What ensures that research is independent (regardless of the sources of funding) is the degree to which control is exercised over the research directions, methodology, and findings.
Our approach is to explicitly maintain control over all three, and never, under any circumstances, cede that to any of our clients. We–and we alone–select the topics we choose to focus on. We follow a rigorous, objective methodology which is detailed in every major research study we release (including this one).
And under no circumstances do we promise our clients–or anyone–that a specific outcome will be forthcoming.
That is the fundamental distinction between us and research firms that deliver “outcomes for dollars” (which sadly, do exist). If a prospective client asks us to do so, we decline and direct them elsewhere.
You also ask why we don’t post a list of our clients on the Web site.
Keep in mind that we generally work with the IT department (not the marketing department) of companies. Legal departments take a very dim view of their IT organizations posting the company name on web sites.
So getting approval to post a client list is a pain in the neck–for them as well as for us. And again, they are receiving research from us, rather than “sponsoring” it (in the sense of controlling the agenda, directions, or findings).
You have a series of questions about why the press release was structured the way it was. Rather than go through each, I’ll agree that you’re correct: We were not as smooth and polished in how we presented our findings to the public as we would have liked.
For example, we included a statement clarifying the relationship between the IIA and stating that they are a Nemertes client, but it appears you missed it, and we apologize for that.
Frankly, we do not have the experience in communicating with the mainstream press that folks like SavetheInternet and the IIA do. We’re not an advocacy group, and our inexperience showed.
Our response is simply to ask for the work to stand for itself, and advise anyone with questions to review the report before making statements about its context.
Finally, in the interests of openness, I would appreciate it if you could post these clarifications not only here, but to the other locations where we’ve submitted it following publication of your piece, including the Huffington blog and your personal blog spot, which have not yet been updated with our response (though we submitted it yesterday).
As we state in the FAQ we are not making policy recommendations. We are looking at data trends that have been painstakingly researched.
Many different organizations will use the data to draw their own conclusions, each with their own agenda. The best way to balance the discussion is to make the data open–as we have–and help everyone review it from their perspective.
We would like to invite SavetheInternet to discuss the data, the methodology and the implications of the results. Can we schedule a time to give you a briefing and get your feedback?
Again, we appreciate the response.
November 23rd, 2007 at 2:04 pm
[…] a response to a «www.savetheinternet.com» by Karr criticizing the Nemertes research, the research group disputed the suggestion that […]
November 23rd, 2007 at 2:06 pm
[…] a response to a «www.savetheinternet.com» by Karr criticizing the Nemertes research, the research group disputed the suggestion that […]
December 6th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Well I think Johna Till Johnson, if you agree that the impression given by the media is an overreaction, and the incorrect way to portray the information you so painstakingly researched.
Wouldn’t it make sense to offer yourselves up to be interviewed by the media so you can point out the prominent points that make your statement more of a technical difficulty, rather than a worldwide crash.
December 9th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Johna Till Johnson said:
“Finally, we dispute in the strongest possible terms that we have a particular agenda to promote.”
*I* have an agenda to promote….*PROTECTING THE INTERNET*.
GTFO.
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:11 pm
[…] The Save the Internet Blog says that Internet companies want money and control and research such as the above is […]
March 31st, 2008 at 7:47 pm
[…] inversin en estructura de 137 billones (americanos) de dlares. Lo que omite Jos Carlos Garca es el hallazgo de varios blogs: el hecho de que Nemertes Research est afiliada y le sirve de megfono a los intereses de la IIA […]