The telecom slayers

In the Capitol Hill battle over Net neutrality, a ragtag army of grass-roots Internet groups, armed with low-budget videos, music parodies and petitions, have the corporate telecoms, and their allies in Congress, on the run.

By Daniel W. Reilly

Read more: Technology & Business

Oct. 2, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- Ben Scott is smiling like a man who just hit the jackpot. As one of the coordinators of SavetheInternet.com, Scott is a leading advocate for Net neutrality, a congressional provision that would prohibit Internet service providers from charging Web sites for faster delivery of data. Scott is the closest thing there is to a field general in the grass-roots campaign to ensure Net neutrality, waging a daily battle with telecom giants AT&T and Verizon, who stand to boost their profits by creating toll roads on their Internet lines.

For more than a year, telecom lobbyists, who include former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, have outgunned Scott and his ragtag army of bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs and consumer-rights activists on Capitol Hill. But on this fall day in his bare-bones office in Washington, Scott is grinning in victory. He knows he has succeeded in tripping up the lobbying goliaths with a simple weapon that couldn't be more appropriate in the battle over the Internet: a low-budget video posted on YouTube.com.

In the unadorned black-and-white film, college kids sit in front of a webcam and talk about the evils of an Internet without Net neutrality. "Do you want companies to control your clicks?" a goateed young man asks the camera. "This means slower connections to sites that are under competing ISPs," another says. "Let's keep the Internet free!" After a guitar solo and a hazy image of the American flag, the video goes black and directs viewers to SavetheInternet.com.

In the first week after it was posted on YouTube on Aug. 17, the video was viewed over 350,000 times, according to figures provided by the site. By comparison, the infamous "macaca" video of Virginia Sen. George Allen calling a man of Indian descent the racial slur, was viewed 200,000 times in roughly the same amount of time. A testament to the power of viral marketing, the Net neutrality video "is doing the work of 30 full-time communications professionals," Scott says. "And the best part is, I have no idea who made it."

In fact, the video was made in a little over an hour by Ben Going, a 21-year-old waiter from Huntsville, Ala., and an aspiring Internet filmmaker. Going says he pieced the video together because he feels that his hobby, his business, his way of life, is under attack. He is not alone. All summer long, hundreds of Web users like Going have flooded the Internet with videos and blog postings. An online petition in favor of Net neutrality has gathered more than 1.1 million signatures, and a letter-writing campaign spawned online has resulted in a flood of letters to Congress members. Barry Piatt, communications director for Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a leading Net neutrality advocate, says his office has received close to 1 million letters on Net neutrality, "a virtually unprecedented level" of mail for any issue, let alone one as technical as this one. And the "overwhelming majority" of the letters, Piatt says, favor Net neutrality.

Web giants like Google, eBay and Amazon, which will be forced to pay the lion's share of fees on an Internet fast lane, have certainly not been quiet. They've spent millions to slug it out with the telecom companies but have yet to land a knockout blow. The real action remains at the grass roots. "Two very different models are now coming to head," says Craig Aaron of SavetheInternet.com. "One is entrenched lobbyists in D.C. doing what they have always done, fighting it out inside the Beltway. On the other side is this new grass-roots movement, using new communications tools and finding new ways to organize. This is people using the Internet to save the Internet."

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