I've been meaning to blog this for a few days, but you may have noticed a few items on Breaking Blue about a major step for the Save the Internet coalition: our first legislative victory.  Maine passed into law a provision ordering the Office of the Public Advocate to investigate what Maine could legally do to protect net neutrality in Maine, with the understanding that net neutrality is critical for Maine business and democracy in Maine.  There was heavy lobbying against this by Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, but the lobbying campaign failed.  

The Maine legislature, pressured by Common Cause, League of Young Voters, the Community Television Association of Maine, the Maine Civil Liberties Union, and the blog Turn Main Blue, has taken the extraordinary first step of pushing for net neutrality protections.  There was some discussion about whether to pass a full-blown law mandating protections for net neutrality, but the legislature settled on an investigation of the state's authority to prevent a costly legal challenge.  Depending on the outcome of that investigation, you can expect either a state resolution calling on Congress to mandate net neutrality protections, or an actual law protecting net neutrality in Maine.

There are a few reasons this resolution passed in Maine and did not in Maryland.  First of all, Maine has a clean elections system, so legislators can make decisions without immense pressure from corporate interests.  Second of all, for institutional reasons, CWA is weak in Maine, and so did not really play in this dispute.  It was CWA that killed the Maryland resolution, and that is keeping the Democratic leadership from embracing net neutrality in their technology agenda.

The lessons are clear going forward.  We need public financing of elections, and we need to persuade CWA to adopt net neutrality as a core policy principle.  They aren't far, and I'm hoping that we can have a fruitful dialogue with them on the issue.

In April, I asked you to email CWA President Larry Cohen.  You may have noticed that I stopped blogging about them for awhile, and that's because I have been in contact with senior policy analyst Debbie Goldman, who has been patiently working to facilitate a dialogue.  Their President, Larry Cohen, invited me to meet with them on May 11, and since then we've been working to schedule a dialogue and negotiating the contours of it.  Their spam filter ate about eight of my emails, so if you emailed Larry Cohen there's a good chance it didn't get to him.  So bottom line, I've been trying to schedule a meeting with the CWA for about a month now, a meeting Larry kindly suggested we have.  

Aside from this willingness to dialogue, there's a lot of great progress on the telecom reform front.  Maine's resolution is a great step forward, since we know have a demonstrated legislative success.  And CWA's willingness to talk to net neutrality proponents is hopeful, as is the Brodsky bill being discussed in New York state and blogged on the Albany Project for near universal build-out.  This one's in Eliot Spitzer's court, if he decides to get going on it against the interests of the telecom and cable companies, we can have his back with a massive CWA/Moveon/blog push.  That bill, which includes buildout provisions and net neutrality is backed by a coalition of consumer groups, media reform groups, and CWA.  And then of course, there's the 700 spectrum auction, which Kevin Drum frames really nicely here.  

All in all, we're making great progress organizing around this policy issue.  Every single Democratic Presidential candidate has come out for net neutrality, and so has Mike Huckabee (for an amusing threat from big business interests towards Huckabee, see Scott Cleland's post, where the operative quote is 'Don't believe this is his "official" policy position for a minute.').  Freepress, for whom I did a bit of consulting work earlier this year, just won a webbie for its SavetheInternet campaign, and is well-respected in the Beltway for their expertise.  We've got strong industry allies.  This is an ongoing fight against some of the nastiest industries in America - cable and telecom - and it's going to take a long time.  But I'm encouraged, because our strategic openings keep expanding, and we're getting better and better at this.  

Congrats, Maine lawmakers, for doing the right thing.  And good job, Common Cause, Maine Civil Liberties Union, the League of Young Voters, Community Television Association of Maine, and Turn Maine Blue.  This stuff matters.

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Ok, so get ready for a really messed up backstory on the whole Fox News/CBC/Presidential politics angle.  Ben Smith at the Politico reminded me this sordid episode, and it's a nice microcosm of horrible insider corporate Democratic politics.  Here's the story.

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One of the things I've learned is that building an open and neutral communications environment is a slugfest, a game of inches.  America has a top-down mass communications environment and a populace that is used to being marketed to.  We don't like thousands of advertising messages a day from people who lie to us for profit, but we accept it because it doesn't seem like there's any choice.  This creates a weird sort of muted anger that comes out in flashpoints on the right and the left (anger at free trade, immigration, and anti-media sentiments for starters).  Anyway, the net neutrality fight has shown us what happens when a frustrated public begins to organize against corporate elites.  AT&T, Verizon, and their various hired flunkies like Mike McCurry lie, obfuscate, and betray the public.  But when the political winds shift, they shift, and today there was an important and perceptible shift in the fight.  AT&T, the single worst company in terms of net neutrality, gave up a lot of ground to an angry public.

Here's the story - as a condition of AT&T's merger with Bellsouth, AT&T as agreed to net neutrality protections for 24 months or until net neutrality legislation is passed.  Scholar Tim Wu has a good analysis of the deal and how the precedent of this regulation will allow Congress to act more effectively to legislate on net neutrality protections.  The FCC will probably approve the merger with these new conditions.  Even though the merger shouldn't go through, getting net neutrality protections for the tens of millions of customers who use AT&T is a massive victory for a Bush-dominated FCC.  This is the biggest, baddest lobby in DC, and they didn't just lose on net neutrality last cycle, they lost again in what should have been a slam dunk.

There are a number of really important concessions that AT&T made.  First of all, the company acknowledged that the public has an interest in regulating these networks, that these networks are not AT&T's private property but are a regulated public communications vehicle that AT&T manages for profit.  This is a hugely important moral claim, and it shows that the public has won a subtle victory on who should control public communication.  Hint, it's not AT&T.  Second of all, this victory showed that the public can regulate AT&T's network.  AT&T CEO Ed Whiteacre, Hands Off the Internet Chair Mike McCurry, and telco-controlled Senator Ted Stevens have all argued that net neutrality can't be defined and so it can't be regulated.  Well it turns out that telecom companies can define net neutrality when it allows them to make billions.  Funny that.

There are other important technical victories here, including the fact that WiMax can now be subject to net neutrality regulations.  Now of course this is not a perfect deal, and there are very savvy skeptics who believe that AT&T will try to drive a truck through what look like very small loopholes.  And frankly, I tend to agree that these companies - the executives and lobbyists of whom lie without blinking - will try to get around any regulation they can, and failing that, will simply break the law and litigate.  We should be under no illusions that Verizon and AT&T act in good faith, ever, and react to anything except brute political force and their own greed.  I assume they will betray, but in betraying the deal, AT&T will show that it needs more regulatory oversight and not less, and in betraying it will generate even more of a public backlash.  There's going to be a fight in Congress over extending net neutrality protections through legislation, as well as genuinely building out a national high speed universal internet that these companies work against and that countries like South Korea had years ago.

For now, we can take solace in the fact a Bush-crony dominated FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, and a multi-billion dollar telecom industry, lost to a group of public interest advocates and a fed-up public.  These executives, who do none of the work of operating the systems they use to loot the public through obnoxious toll-booths and subpar services, lost not only this battle, but the intellectual argument that they are anything but a series of PACs and lobbyists attached to a billing service.  And that's going to hurt.

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This comment from Mike McCurry on net neutrality is just sad.

Go and report for yourself and then you decide. There is another side to this argument that the blogosphere is covering up.

Covering up?  Whatever.  The telecom companies have tens of millions of dollars to get their message out, and they just can't because no one trusts what they say about the internet.  How is that a cover-up as opposed a smart case of citizens deciding that self-interested liars are not worth inclusion in the formulation of their opinions?

When we started with the net neutrality debate I was initially respectful of Mike McCurry, who worked in a difficult capacity as White House press secretary for Bill Clinton.  I respected him, and was quite honored that he would comment on MyDD.  It's been really sad to watch him unwind the reputation he's built up, sad to see this guy destroy himself with paranoia and anger.  

There's something deeper at work here.  It's not just that McCurry is paid to say these silly comments about net neutrality and the blogosphere.  McCurry believes that what he's doing is absolutely morally appropriate, and that his opposition is not.  He has refused to grow with the times, has refused to grapple with the genuine right-wing extremism in the political system that has coddled his ego for decades.  As a result, his actions are guided by a dangerous amorality that is out of step in these times.

Taylor Marsh for instance pointed me to this passage in State of Denial about McCurry's role in the Kerry campaign.  

At 3:36 a.m., a very sensitive communication from the Kerry camp was relayed to Rove and Bartlett at the White House. Mike McCurry, Clinton's former White House press secretary and a last-minute addition to the Kerry campaign, had e-mailed Nicole Devenish, the Bush campaign communications director, an off-the-record congratulations, advising that the Bush team should not try to force a resolution now. Don't pressure Kerry, McCurry said. In the end, he believed Kerry would do the right thing.

Bartlett and others told Bush about the e-mail, summarizing the message as "We'll do the right thing at the right time." They could trust that McCurry would be in a position to know what the Kerry campaign was thinking, Bartlett said, but they had to be careful not to put too much stock in it. At least we know there are people in the Kerry camp giving rational advice, Bartlett said. ... ...

Card said they should declare victory. ... ... ...

STATE OF DENIAL, by Bob Woodward (pgs. 344-347)

In my post, I didn't accuse McCurry of anything, but I did say that McCurry owed us Kerry supporters an explanation.  Here's the email he sent to me in response.

I worked hard for Senator Kerry and think that I helped.  I went back to my hotel room in Boston at around 3am on election night, turned on CNN and saw that Bush was about to go out and declare victory.  That pissed me off and I sent an email to Nicolle Wallace (then Devenish) telling her that was a stupid thing to do because it would inflame our side.  She had worked for me in my dot.com days and I knew she would stop twice and think about the consequences of the President going out to claim a second term while we were still sifting through the reports from lawyers in Ohio.

Bush did not go out and that was a good decision by his team.  We sifted the results and I believe we made the right decision.  If you think there is something there to apologize for, you are as dumb about politics as I suspect.  Those are the facts but I know they matter less to you than the argument.

This is what the 2006 election, and beyond, is about.  Will we have a moral tone in DC that is divorced from the suffering that it creates?  Will our political choices represent the will of citizens, or the will of an elite that pushes apathy, torture, and greed as the new American religion?  Will we allow old vain men to make decisions they don't understand causing pain they don't feel?  

These are fundamental questions, and there will not be a resolution on November 7.  As Sidney Blumenthal points out, the malignant right will not go quietly, and we need to recognize that it's going to be a long, hard slog, and some of those who purport to be on our side may never again find their moral bearings.

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Wow, if true, Taylor catches something that is really really bad.

At 3:36 a.m., a very sensitive communication from the Kerry camp was relayed to Rove and Bartlett at the White House. Mike McCurry, Clinton's former White House press secretary and a last-minute addition to the Kerry campaign, had e-mailed Nicole Devenish, the Bush campaign communications director, an off-the-record congratulations, advising that the Bush team should not try to force a resolution now. Don't pressure Kerry, McCurry said. In the end, he believed Kerry would do the right thing.

Bartlett and others told Bush about the e-mail, summarizing the message as "We'll do the right thing at the right time." They could trust that McCurry would be in a position to know what the Kerry campaign was thinking, Bartlett said, but they had to be careful not to put too much stock in it. At least we know there are people in the Kerry camp giving rational advice, Bartlett said. ... ...

Card said they should declare victory. ... ... ...

STATE OF DENIAL, by Bob Woodward (pgs. 344-347)

Like Carville, McCurry owes an explanation to his fellow Democrats.

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