With no major problems of Internet discrimination yet, the government should stay out, he [Mike McCurry] said.
We've heard about AOL blocking email for an origanization that was opposing them, and Telus blocking access to its' opponents' website during a union fight. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and anecdotal stories.
So follow me below the fold, and SEE a situation where a big Internet provider figured that it could act as the gatekeeper to its customers ... by offering their advertising partners the opportunity to place their advertising right on top of their competitors' (non-advertisers') web pages.
The time was Fall 1997. WebTV, a start-up which provided an Internet appliance and access, had just been purchased by Microsoft for $425 million. There were around 100,000 WebTV subscribers, and WebTV was just about to announce its WebTV Plus box (which Microsoft also intended to use in cable as Microsoft TV - the reason for the purchase).
WebTV announced a new advertising program, called "Surf Spots." What was unique about them was that WebTV offered to put the ads right on top of the advertisers' competitors' web sites, or anywhere else they wanted. "Target by category or URL" said their promotional material.
The "Surf Spot" interstitial ads would come up either when the consumer accessed the targeted site or even surfed the pages within it. The ads had "hot" links embedded which would have focus while the ads were displayed. If the end-user "clicked" the select button during that time, the interstitial advertiser's page would be retrieved instead of the web page that had been requested. And here's what they looked like:
Oldsmobile (partner) ads were placed over Mercury's (non-partner) website.
AT&T (partner) ads over MCI's website.
National Discount Brokers ads over Arlen Specter's website. NDB must have liked the Senate, because I have snaps of their ads over Dianne Feinstein's, Ted Kennedy's, and Fred Dalton Thompson's web pages, too.
Since the only people who would ever see the interstitial ads would be the WebTV users themselves (which WebTV itself described as "technophobes", Silicon Valley-speak for low-lifes) and the advertisers who were paying for the interstitials, WebTV figured they'd be fine. After all, no one important used WebTV, so the web sites which had WebTV's ads on top of them would never know.
When WebTV users complained, they told them that there were ads on their cable TV, and WebTV was just like that. When a few web sites complained, they were either offered the opportunity of advertising on top of their competitors (and being protected in the process), or ignored if they didn't have the $10K to pony up. "After all, we're Microsoft now, and those are our subscribers and we can do what we want with them."
And that's the way it was for some weeks ... until one person gave up trying to argue, and sat down with a Snappy to get some screen shots. The Ford legal department got a call, and pictures of Oldsmobile hijacking their website. MCI's legal department got a picture of the AT&T ads. Feinstein, Spectre, Kennedy, Thompson, et al, got pictures of their sites with National Discount Brokers ads over their pictures (no response from any Senator, btw).
And the LA Times got pictures of all of them, and also their very own site with non-LA Times advertisers on top of them.
The LA Times made the story page 1 of their Business section. Times-Mirror, parent company of the LAT, filed suit. Microsoft's WebTV unit suddenly saw the error of their ways, and that was the end of the over-the-site and between-page interstitials. When interstitials were resurrected a year or so later, they did not interrupt a user surfing within a site, not did they appear over any site's content:
1998: WebTV Upgrade to Include "Surf Spot" Advertising
Mike McCurry's statement would be bullshit anyway -- just because someone hasn't yet done something that you know that they will do is no reason NOT to try to prevent them from it. And frankly, if they weren't planning to discriminate, why would they be pushing so hard to be allowed to do so?
But more specifically (and personally) --
EVERY battle that has to be fought to protect the rights of Americans takes a huge and personal toll on the people who do the fighting. If they take on a big and powerful entity, they will pay a very high price and their lives will never be the same - even if they "win" the fight.
The REAL battle that is being fought here is not a battle of "centrist" vs "anti-corporate liberal" as McCurry wants to put it. The battle is for the American government to get back to its role of serving all HUMAN Americans and NOT just the interests of big organizations who can afford bribes lobbyists with political contributions.