Not so sly

If there's anything that large corporations are, it's out of touch. Mind you, we owe a bit of that to supply and demand. It hasn't taken a lot to pull the wool over our eyes on most issues historically, so there really hasn't been any reason to actually go to the work of designing a really insidious scam. Slowly, however, the brutes in suits are catching on. In the PR war raging over net neutrality(more on this later) down in ye olde U. S. of A. the ISPs looking to block any net neutrality legislation, or, more likely, push through legislation that will cement new capabilities for ISP's that have up until now been illegal, have realised that traditional P.R. might be ineffective on this issue and have instead targetted the issue with flash animated web comics apparently designed to look like a grass-roots effort to support them.

I really did have to emphasize that word slowly though. Here are the details:

1)because such a stupid thing would never spread on its own, they had to spend money promoting the site(s) through advertising spots on websites such as slashdot.

2)despite attempting to make the animation look hand-drawn, it's the most overproduced one I've ever seen. Among other things, the voiceover sounds like it's done by the same velvet voiced fellow who does high-paid tv ads, from the sound-studio quality to the "I'm-pretending-you're-either-in-second-grade-or-just-really-slow" pacing of the words to the little soundbytes and corporate-style 'explanations' and diagrams.

3)despite naming one of their sites with the catchy "dontregulate.org" name, they missed the number one(and number two) things every grass-roots campaign on the net ever has had: a forum and a petition.

So here's what I did. First, since I pay to be able to download whatever bytes I want with my bandwidth, I clicked on their ad about 300 times. Since most of those ads are pay per click, I figure that's got to start to 'ad' up. Also, you'll note that every time I click I'm opening up their bloated flash file in a background window and adding to their hosting costs by eating their bandwidth like a homebaked pie. Actually, since all of those files start playing one after the other and they all start with a humming bit, it sounds not unlike some sort of bizarre barbershop intro. If for nothing other than this unique musical experience, you owe it to yourself to find one of these ads(easily recognisable by the cartoon image with '2007 the future of the internet' written on it) and try this for yourselves. Oh yeah, and enjoy it. These might be the last days anyone has to pick their bytes this freely ever again. That is unless we can save our 'One dumb pipe.'

Why am I so worried about Net Neutrality, one might ask. Well, for one thing, it's bad enough that ISP's can overstate their bandwidth while overcharging for it(I pay for something like 4 mbps but rarely see 1 even in a spike. Meanwhile, North America is powers of ten behind Asia in the level of bandwidth they claim to offer at all, not to begin to mention the ratios of charges between the two continents) already. The last thing we need is ISP's able to claim 'Hi Speed with 100 mbps service' when what they really mean is the same 1mbps core line with a superfast side pipe for pay per view video. All this not to mention the extortion and censorship style activities this would open us up to(charging competitors more to deliver their content, or delivering it with poorer quality of service, etc.) The fact is, our 'one dumb pipe' has served us pretty well, just the way it was specifically designed to. To find out more, go to www.savetheinternet.com