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Monday, September 29, 2008

Clinton's press secretary v neutral net

According to David Reed, Bill Clinton's erstwhile press secretary is now running a company making it their business to sell the idea that net neutrality is a bad idea.

"The hottest new faux-digerati lobby firm in DC in the communications field is Mike McCurry’s new firm Arts+Labs. McCurry is an old political hand, Bill Clinton’s press secretary, looking for a second career after the Clintons. Apparently there’s no big cash to be had protecting our freedom of speech, but Cisco and AT&T are happy to fund him to run a firm to defend ISP’s right to do “deep packet inspection” (DPI).

Only Arts+Labs doesn’t dare call it DPI, which sounds just a bit scary and Big Brotherish. Instead they call it the “intelligent network” that will smooth our experience, cleansing it of all those uneven experiences. Those of us who are as old as I am - 56 - might remember that the term “Intelligent Network” was a Bell Labs idea that failed due to the success of the Internet. As David Isenberg told it, the Internet was the “Rise of the Stupid Network“."

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