NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] New "Shark" AT&T Ad and Bizarre Blog Posting Attempt to Ridicule Net Neutrality
New "Shark" AT&T Ad and Bizarre Blog Posting
Attempt to Ridicule Net Neutrality
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000752.html
Greetings. Very recently in "Free Press, Lauren Weinstein, Google,
and Net Neutrality" ( http://bit.ly/9VikaK [Lauren's Blog] ) and
"The New McCarthyism of Google-Baiting Spreads Its Stain"
( http://bit.ly/9jXK1d [Lauren's Blog] ), I expressed strong
condemnation of particular tactics being used by certain groups both
in support of Net Neutrality (a cause that I myself very much support)
and to unfairly target and attack Google.
Unfortunately, obnoxious attempts to ridicule opponents are not
limited to any one side in these debates.
Case in point, a new AT&T display ad that I saw today at The Hill,
which attempts to use "religious" connotations to attack aspects of
Net Neutrality arguments ( http://bit.ly/9KHPYU [Lauren's Blog] ).
Primarily consisting of the text "Has the net neutrality dogma jumped
the shark?" -- the ad links to a 31 August posting on the AT&T Public
Policy Blog titled, "The Danger of Dogma" ( http://bit.ly/biOSSa ).
The term "Jump the Shark" -- in case you're not familiar with it --
relates to a particular episode of the old TV show "Happy Days"
in which one of the main characters ("Fonz") performs a water ski jump
over a confined shark. So "jump the shark" now generally refers to a
point in a television series (or anything else) where something
particularly "ridiculous" occurs that marks the downward trajectory in
the quality of the series (or whatever) itself.
But the bizarre nature of the AT&T blog item in question -- whose
author apparently thought it was "oh so cute" to invoke religious
imagery (of all things!) to try make their point, suggests that sharks
are being jumped at AT&T as well.
Particularly noteworthy is the "dogma" posting's multiple usages of
the term "CoENN" -- which AT&T defines as "Church of Extreme Net
Neutrality." As it happens, I'm not a religious person, but I still
find such usage, not once but over and over again, to be ingratiating,
rather demeaning, and really not funny at all.
In fact, the continued invoking of "CoENN" by the post's author, as if
it were an everyday acronym, tended to significantly detract from the
technical and policy points that AT&T presumably had actually wished
to make.
AT&T's attempt to combine a serious discussion with repeated Church of
Extreme Net Neutrality references can only then be seen as primarily
an effort to ridicule, rather than actually provide a straightforward
and serious analysis of policy issues.
This seems overall to be beneath the standards that AT&T and its
shareholders would presumably wish to uphold, and -- come to think of
it -- suggests that rather than just jumping the shark, AT&T in this
case appears to be diminishing its own credibility by jumping over
Moby Dick himself.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz