But as these supposed media reformers actively work with community groups and state and federal agencies to oppose corporate interests on behalf of consumers, they fail to divulge their own ties to competitive corporate interests. And now, there are reports that a state commission may also have played a role in helping the competition.

As Amanda Carey has detailed at The Daily Caller, these Net Neutrality advocates have a long history of opposing these very companies, with the support of corporate competitors.

There is, and has been, a growing coalition advocating for media reform. But when the dots are all connected, what is left is far from a grassroots campaign. In reality, it’s a web of players advocating for corporate interests, coordinated by a public affairs specialist.

Within weeks of its announcement, media reform groups teamed up on a new “grassroots” initiative to fight the proposed telecom merger, complete with its very own website, NoTakeover.org.  Notice the website’s fine print?  “This site was developed with the support of Sprint.”

That’s right, Sprint.  Do you smell Astroturf?

The activity and its funding is especially notable in light of an incident that occurred earlier this week.  Politico reports that Sprint customers received an unsolicited text message notifying them of a public hearing with the California Public Utilities Commission, another entity that’s been recruited to review the proposed merger.

Some Californians were baffled to receive a text from Sprint this week reading “SprintFreeMsg: Public hearings on Proposed AT&T / T-Mobile merger July 21, 25, 27 in Culver City, San Diego, Fresno. More info at www.cpuc.ca.gov/merger” Was this a case of Sprint telling its customers to go lobby against the deal at public hearings held by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is reviewing the acquisition?

That’s a good question.  It would certainly appear that CPUC is coordinating with Sprint.

Politico goes on to state:

It turns out the origin of the message was the state commission itself, which drafted it and asked Sprint to send it. “Doing the texts messages was one of the ways we thought would reach the exact audience we are trying to reach, but we wanted to be sure there was no cost because we realize the text is unsolicited,” said a commission spokeswoman. A Sprint spokesman said the company has received a couple of complaints about the texts. Kate Hennigan, a Sprint customer who works for the city of Los Angeles, said she received the message this morning but “didn’t care.” For its part, AT&T has got the word out about the hearings through notices in 80 newspapers in 10 languages, said a spokesman.

So, a state entity, by its own admission, has in fact coordinated with Sprint to send out the unsolicited text message – an action that violates Sprint’s own Customer Privacy Policy.  Various state and federal laws of course also prohibit cell phone providers from sending unsolicited text messages to a recipient unless there is an already established business relationship.  In this case, Sprint may be facilitating the distribution of the message, but the content actually comes from a third party, the CPUC, which in most cases likely does not have a relationship with Sprint’s customers.  Did the CPUC or Sprint break any laws with this action? Did the commission request that AT&T and T-Mobile send the same message to their customers as well, or were those companies left to rely only upon their newspaper announcements?

If this turns out to be the case, how can this commission render an unbiased judgment if they are already secretly collaborating with one side?

Ironically, many of the same media reform activists argued the stance in 2007 that “the decision of what kinds of speech a customer hears should be left to the customer and not to their wireless carrier.”  Will these so-called public interest groups condemn the actions of CPUC and Sprint?

In the days and weeks to follow, it will be interesting to see if the CPUC members who coordinated with Sprint recuse themselves from the review and decision making process.

In addition, CREDO Mobile, the progressive phone company and subsidiary of Working Assets co-founded by Drummond Pike, is a mobile virtual network operator that resells Sprint, and uses its platform to conduct a wide variety of political activism campaigns through text messaging.  CREDO lobbied the FCC just recently, urging the agency to deny AT&T / T-Mobile’s petition.

The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile will have a deleterious effect on competition and consumers, and render it difficult to succeed with business models like that of CREDO Mobile, Inc.  [snip] CREDO’s customers, who rely on innovations in the wireless arena to connect them with both mobile devices and service and with sophisticated tools for charitable giving, will be hard hit.

Charitable giving?  Let’s not forget that CREDO, whose slogan is “fight the right wing with every call you make,” has long been exploiting the Tea Party to help grease the skids for this AT&T fight.

“CREDO would never give a dime to the Tea Party. When you join CREDO, you’ll join a movement dedicated to defeating right-wing radicalism.  [see "CREDO Action site]

That’s a platform for enabling political attacks, not “charitable giving.”  I’m all for fair competition, but let’s at least stop pretending that propaganda comes only from one side of the political spectrum, shall we?  Perhaps it’s time to start asking some questions of Sprint, the California Public Utilities Commission and the so-called “media reform” activists.

Meena’s company is the nation’s largest privately-owned wireless carrier.  Meena testified with other NoTakeOver members at a Senate hearing last week, strenuously urging that the merger be killed by the FCC and DoJ.  Getting there, he had to paint a dire picture – that consumers would suffer, jobs would diminish, Internet innovation would end, and the wireless industry would tank – if the merger gets the official OK from regulators.

His relationship with NoTakeOver is particularly odd in that his new friends – especially those at New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project – want to crush companies like his with “light touch” Net Neutrality regulations recently imposed by the FCC.

From the moment those Internet regulations got announced last December, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project started grumbling like petulant children who didn’t get exactly what they asked for on their birthday.  “Sure,” they huffed, “the rules are better than nothing.  But we demand more.  FCC, you’ve come up short!”

In their view, the only way to ensure that the Internet remains “open” is through 19^th Century rules that check the sure-to-be “evilness” of network providers…like Cellular South.

Thankfully, the FCC’s rules don’t go that far – that is, for the time being.  But, this hasn’t stopped the group.

The Soros-friendlies continue their work, spinning their yarn that the Internet is broken.  This at a time when access to broadband through a multitude of means has become virtually universal, making the Internet robust, innovative and consumer-friendly without a centralized (and corruptible) cop on the beat.

With their latest manufactured group, NoTakeOver, they seek to exploit the AT&T / T-Mobile merger to impose regulations that they couldn’t otherwise achieve before.  In doing so, they’ll also realize a hefty return on their investment for themselves, too.

This comes straight out of the “consumer advocate” playbook: 1. See a corporate business plan that needs government’s blessing; 2. Create a “grassroots” coalition to oppose it; and 3. Create enough of a headache for those corporations so that they’ll agree to most anything to get the “consumer advocates” off their backs.

It’s a proven strategy.  Not only have the misanthropes helped bring about innovation-killing, resource-draining regulations on the communications industry (as in “light touch” Internet regulation, or the Comcast / NBC-U Merger “Agreement”), the non-profit groups have profited handsomely from their efforts in this milieu, raking in millions over the past five years alone simply by opposing corporations they don’t like.

So, why would any company work with these miscreants?

One can only surmise that Hu Meena (and NoTakeOver funder, Sprint, for that matter) believes he has a better shot at crying to policymakers to “protect” himself than in controlling his own fate by actually competing in the marketplace for market share.

Or, perhaps it’s a cynical bargaining position designed to yield, well, who-knows-what for his company.

Whatever the reason, anyone that sides with the likes of New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project is playing Russian Roulette.  Though Cellular South is Meena’s to control, if the misanthropes had their way, the wireless provider would be the public’s property, and Meena just a GS-15 public servant.

That’s because, in their view, the Internet is simply too important to let private companies control.

Private companies built the medium to its greatness today, but that’s not good enough for those at NoTakeOver.  That cuts them and their friends on the Hill, at the agencies and in academia out of the picture, which is not acceptable for the control fetishists that they are.

They cannot accept that a vibrant marketplace always presents hurdles for competitors; that it’s tough out there.  That said, within this (albeit imperfect) framework, the spontaneous order of lawfully-run markets remains the primary – and least corruptible – force in choosing winners and deciding where limited resources should be apportioned.  It has made the world far better off than any amount of central planning ever could.

Meena should know that his new friends stand against that.  Firmly.

They want to tip the scale in favor of those they favor, even if it means hamstringing private property, or redistributing wealth and resources to other less-deserving entities, or further distorting the free marketplace so that it is somehow “fair” and “equitable.”

Sadly, once this episode is over – however it turns out – they’ll expect Meena to leave his money on the dresser and scram.

That’s what strange bedfellows do to their marks, Johns and Hu’s.

On December 15 in a speech for the Media Access Project, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd claimed to refute numerous what he called “exaggerations and distortions” of a wide range of his thoughts, positions and policy prescriptions from what he called a “right-wing smear campaign.”  What Lloyd did was offer numerous falsehoods and denials about things that are undeniably true.

Just some of his many misrepresentations:

• LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” was “distorting my views about the First Amendment.”

TRUTH: From Lloyd’s 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America:

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press.  This freedom is all too often an exaggeration … “[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.

Excerpt here:

• LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” incorrectly asserted that Lloyd is “a supporter of Hugo Chavez.”

TRUTH: Lloyd as the head of the Leadership Council for Civil Rights participating in a panel discussion:

In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.  The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him.  But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.

Video: http://ow.ly/M5UE

• LLOYD LIE: “I am not at the FCC to remove anybody, whatever their color, from power.”

TRUTH: Lloyd at the May of 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice:

Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem. We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.

Audio here.

Why are Obama’s leadership picks so incapable of telling the truth? It is not necessary for conservatives to ‘distort’ or ‘smear’ Mark Lloyd. All we have to do is quote him. When we do, he has public meltdowns with hysterical and dishonest accusations.

Mr. Lloyd, we’re not going to stop talking about you or your record, using that media – the alternative media – you and your radical friends despise so much because you can’t control it.

On one side are public interest groups including the Media Access Project, Free Press, Consumers Union and the New America Foundation.  On the other are several high-profile African-American groups including the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women, The National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials and the National Association of Black County Officials.

According to National Journal, the public interest groups wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski last week to express concern regarding recent statements made by an FCC official that were less than enthusiastically favorable toward net neutrality.  The groups were evidently seeking Genachowski’s assurance that the FCC was not “pre-judging” the outcome of its rulemaking process with regard to the net neutrality issue.

Meanwhile, the African-American groups are expressing open support for the Broadband Opportunity Coalition, which has raised concerns about the potentially negative impact that net neutrality could have on broadband deployment and adoption.  They are also objecting forcefully to tactics taken by some net neutrality advocates, which they consider to cross a line.  According to the heads of the groups, some net neutrality advocates have “attacked” civil rights organizations and “sought to impugn the integrity, independence and intelligence of members of the Congressional Black Caucus and leaders of the civil rights community who have made adoption and expanded network capacity their highest priorities.”

The attacks of which the groups complain seem focused on the charge that they serve as “Astroturf” designed to further not the interests of those whom they represent but rather those of the telecoms industry.  The groups conversely contend that “Many feel that these [pro-net neutrality] organizations are pushing a regulatory perspective that would regressively shift the costs of bandwidth onto middle- and low-income consumers,” and in their letter describe the net neutrality advocates in question as “elite digital organizations” who “peddle” “destructive racial rhetoric.”

Further underlining the existence of an increasingly nasty rift is that one such organization appears to be Free Press itself.  The group, which one anti-net neutrality technology expert with whom Capitol Confidential spoke, described as “actually Marxist,” operates the site Save The Internet.  Critics say the site regularly publishes the work of authors closely associated with the claims to which the African-American groups object.