Ralph Reed is back and has been on the campaign circuit raising lots and lots of money for his new, shiny, religious right PAC, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. If you'd like to see him in action, tune into CSPAN tomorrow for his shiny new conference, featuring such faithful stalwarts as Mitt Romney, Herman Cain and Glenn Beck.

But just in case you may not be familiar with Ralph Reed, let me share a small excerpt from the Jack Abramoff hearings a few years back, when Kent Conrad had his shot at him:

I was struck by the article in the Washington Post on Sunday. The beginning paragraph says Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public relations consultant Michael Scanlon quietly worked with conservative religious activist Ralph Reed to help the State of Texas shut down an Indian tribe casino in 2002. Then the two quickly persuaded the tribe to pay $4.2 million to try to get Congress to reopen it. If this is not cynical behavior, I do not know what is.

On the one hand, it turns out Scanlon and Abramoff paid Ralph Reed $4 million to conduct a campaign to close down a casino, at the very time they are asking the casino to hire them so that it can get reopened. One week later, after Mr. Abramoff met with the Tiguas who were in danger of getting their casino shut down, a Texas consultant employed by the tribe thanked Abramoff for his visit and said he would push his proposal. Abramoff forwarded the e-mail to Scanlon with the message, ‘‘This guy needs us to save his ass.’’

It goes on to say, Ralph Reed, the conservative religious leader, was paid $4.2 million by Abramoff and Scanlon for his work opposing several tribal casinos. There is an e-mail traffic that is laid out in the paper in which Abramoff writes to Ralph Reed, ‘‘Great. Thanks, Ralph. We should continue to pile on until the place is shuttered,’’ referring to the casino.

Ralph Reed's job was simple: Get the grassroots stirred up and shaken so they would get active and oppose whatever it was his firm, Century Strategies, was paid to oppose. His partner, Tim Phillips, now director of Freedomworks, worked alongside Reed, but the strategies and interaction with Abramoff was strictly between Reed, Abramoff and Scanlon.

Ralph Reed should have gone to jail along with his buddy Jack, and by all rights ought to be slinging pizza in the outer reaches of south Georgia right about now. Instead, he's taken a run at the Lieutenant Governor spot in Georgia and runs Century Strategies, and now the Faith and Freedom Coalition as well. He is not repentant. He makes no apologies for what he did. Also? He made millions.

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John Fund is very, very upset over the FCC's weaksauce Net Neutrality declarations and he's aiming at 'wealthy left-wing' organizations as the culprits. This makes me happy. When a winger can only squirm over something so weak and toothless as to be useless, it's a good day. But look at who he aims at! Paranoid, much?

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that "more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government." The poll went on to say that since "currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly" to prevent a "centrally controlled Internet."

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

Wow. Openly activist? The Berkman Center? Here's the Berkman Center's Berkman@10 page, with some of their research projects and discussions posted online. Such terribly activist things. Open innovation, The Dilemma of Games, The Musician and the Scientist, and yes, Network Neutrality (not Internet Neutrality, by the way), as well as one called The Battle for the Web. Hardly activist.

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Yesterday's FCC decision on Net Neutrality has everyone up in arms on both sides of the battle. Did they split the baby in half or sell out?

Republicans are furious over the decision. Kay Bailey Hutchison took to the Senate floor for 30 minutes or so yesterday railing about how the FCC had overstepped their authority and robbed Congress of theirs. On the other side, NN activists are equally angry over what they view as extremely weak regulatory solutions to the much larger problem of keeping the Internet open and accessible to all. Dan Gillmor predicts the end of the Internet as innovation incubator, and sees it becoming much more like cable TV. I fear he's right.

Ars Technica has a great analysis of why everyone hates it. On the Republican side of things, it's simply that there was any effort at all to regulate the Internet, because we all know backbone providers want nothing more than to provide access to everyone at a low price with no discrimination among users or sites, right? Not so much. This graphic tells the tale.

On the other hand, the regulations they passed have different, less restrictive rules for wireless than wired, and are still hardly enforceable. They allow for paid prioritization, so that each ISP can throttle or charge extra for access to sites like YouTube and Netflix.

Even the Future of Music Coalition, which represents artists, lamented the fact that net neutrality "seemingly falls short of offering full protections."

They don't share Baker's default view of huge ISPs, which dominate the US landscape for wireline broadband, as cuddly companies who would like nothing better than to innovate and invest. And they're deeply disappointed that wireless companies are largely excluded from discrimination rules.

Yeah, that wireless loophole is a pretty big one. And it's a real thorn in the side of pro-Net Neutrality advocates. Interesting that it was Android's ubiquity and so-called openness which drove it. Carriers have made a point of taking that "open system" and locking it down tight with their own bloatware and services, so I'm at a loss to understand the logic of loosening wireless regulations as a result. So, by the way, is TechCrunch's MJ Siegler, who wonders why on earth an operating system would have any impact on a Net Neutrality decision.

Except wait. What the hell does an open operating system have anything to do with network access? Nilay Patel wonders this. John Gruber wonders this. Everyone should wonder this. It really does almost read as if they just copied what Google and Verizon laid out and forgot to remove the self-promotion.

Meanwhile, we still have Comcast's acquisition of NBCU to worry about, as Level 3 Communications takes that to the next level by pressuring the FCC to look at the merger in light of their Net Neutrality rules.

After the NBC Universal acquisition, Comcast’s incentive to discriminate is increased, as those providers now also compete against Comcast’s affiliated Hulu and NBC content,” the Level 3 submission stated. Furthermore, even if online video is viewed as a separate market from cable TV, the deal would give Comcast more reason to play a gatekeeper role.

So I guess we could say that the FCC split the baby and named one half Google and the other half Verizon?

The FCC's new net neutrality rules are being attacked not only by internet activists, but by Republicans who call it "interventionist overreach." Attacks from both sides might tempt you to believe that this must therefore be a reasonable compromise, but you would be wrong. (Here's a clue: The telecoms love it!):

Come Tuesday afternoon, following what will likely be a 3-2 party line vote at the FCC, the new rules of the road will resemble the old rules in many respects — just with less legal authority, and a massive new loophole. For the first time, federal policy would allow for so-called reasonable “paid prioritization,” which critics argue is the first step toward cleaving out high-speed, premium fast-lanes from the “public internet.” This could jeopardize internet innovation by disincentivising entrepreneurial activity on the free, or regular, internet.

The new policy appeared to cross a key hurdle Monday when Democratic FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he would support it.

“The item we will vote on tomorrow is not the one I would have crafted,” Copps said in a statement. “But I believe we have been able to make the current iteration better than what was originally circulated. If vigilantly and vigorously implemented by the Commission — and if upheld by the courts — it could represent an important milestone in the ongoing struggle to safeguard the awesome opportunity-creating power of the open Internet.”

“While I cannot vote wholeheartedly to approve the item, I will not block it by voting against it,” Copps added.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal advocacy group that supports net neutrality, instantly launched a fusillade against Copps.

“Internet users across America will have lost a hero if Commissioner Copps caves to pressure from big business and supports FCC Chairman Genachowski’s fake Net Neutrality rules — rules written by AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, the very companies the public is depending on the FCC to regulate strongly,” PCCC Senior Online Campaigns Director Jason Rosenbaum said in a statement. “There’s no such thing as half a First Amendment, and there’s no such thing as half of Net Neutrality. If approved, Genachowski’s industry-written rules would be a historic mistake: For the first time, the FCC would give its stamp of approval to discrimination online.”

The apparent denouement of this saga comes after five years of debates, lawsuits, botched regulatory actions, grassroots campaigns, and millions of dollars spent lobbying the federal government.

Here's hoping Waxman manages to plug up the worst loopholes before this deal gets rammed through, because they're right: the future of the internet will be greatly affected by this merger.

Is there no merger too large that the Justice Department won't rubberstamp?

.Although there has been a lot of talk in media circles about what Comcast's ownership of NBC Universal would mean for viewers' choice of news and entertainment, the two branches of the federal government reviewing the merger — the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission — are more worried about what the combination means for the online world.

The Web is shaping up to be the No. 1 issue in a mega media merger today, much the way battles over program diversity and commitment to news loomed over media mergers in the past.

"This isn't the run-of-the-mill merger," said Jeffrey Silva, a telecommunications and media analyst with Medley Global Advisors. "Online video is an emerging market and if someone gained power really early, it could stifle it.... That's why there has been so much controversy."

The FCC and the Justice Department have different mandates, although there is considerable overlap between the two.

Generally speaking, the Justice Department's mission is to make sure a merger doesn't diminish competition, and the FCC examines whether a deal serves the public interest.

Rivals, legislators and watchdog groups fear that Comcast, armed with NBC content, will wield too much power in determining how the Internet develops as a medium to watch TV and movies. In addition to the NBC network and Universal Studios, Comcast would also get its hands on big cable channels including USA, Bravo, MSNBC and Syfy.

NBC also owns about one-third of Hulu, the popular online video site.

Congress and federal agencies want to slap conditions on Comcast, which provides cable TV to 1 in 5 homes and has 17 million broadband customers.

The conditions would require Comcast not to withhold its own content — such as cable channels — from any potential broadband competitor or block rival video service providers from accessing Comcast's broadband pipes into homes.

This week, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), who is chairman of the House Energy Commerce Committee, sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Christine Varney, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's antitrust division, outlining the conditions he wants put on the merger.

People close to the review process said Waxman's proposals would probably be very similar to the final terms of the deal.

Google and Verizon released a new plan this week for how the Internet should operate (see Susan's post for more background), if they got to rule the world. We'd keep Net Neutrality for the wired Internet (at least for consumers not corporations), but they could set up fast lanes and slow lanes for the wireless Internet. Wireless is of course the future of the Internet, but then again that is exactly the point.

Their proposal has devided the tech industry, as the NYT reported today, with Facebook, Amazon, eBay and venture capitalists raising serious concerns with the Google/Verizon evil deal:

It set off a flood of reaction, much of it negative, from Web companies and consumer advocacy groups. In the most extreme situation that opponents envision, two Internets could emerge — the public one known today, and a private one with faster lanes and expensive tolls. [snip]

The wireless Internet is quickly emerging as the dominant technology platform, said Matt Cohler, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, a prominent venture firm in Silicon Valley that has invested in start-ups like Twitter. “It is as important to have the right protections in place for the newer platform as it is for the older platform.”

The media has trashed their evil deal and over 300,000 people have signed an open letter demanding Google drop this proposal.

It's a giant corporate power-grab and Google who claims to "do no evil" is doing exactly that with this evil plan. That's why MoveOn, the PCCC (where I work), CREDO Action, Color of Change and Free Press are holding a rally at noon tomorrow in front of Google headquarters. The event is at the corner of Amphitheatre Parkway and Charleston Road in Mountain View. Click here to RSVP.

For people in the San Francisco area, there will be a bus leaving from the San Francisco Opera House at 11 a.m. You have to RSVP to get on the bus, as seats are limited.

This deal can be stopped, but only if President Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski understand just how angry we are at the prospect of our rights being trampled online by Google and other corporate giants. So, please join us, or if you don't live in the Bay Area, pass along the info to your friends.

Open Left: Google goes "evil" - proposes killing Net Neutrality. Help fight back

Balloon Juice: Whining wingnut blames the Uncle he's in business with for the results of his poor management

OurFuture: Conservanomics: A Church Without Bishops (but its got Sarah Palin and invisible Tax Fairies!)

Attytood: "Pop" Poplawski, the high-def hucksters, and the downward cycle of violence

No More Mister Nice Blog: Hearts and Minds, GOP style

Shakesville:: The Dark Ages of America

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was an enthusiastic Obama supporter, isn't very happy about the Google-Verizon agreement:

The word from Washington is that the White House is pressuring, or more diplomatically, “signaling” the F.C.C. to go slow on Barack Obama’s promise to protect “network neutrality.” The depressingly familiar reason why this might be so is that the White House has finally awoken to the huge political costs that this vital economic principle would incur. The less depressing, but also familiar reason is that senior economic policy types in the White House are continuing on their deregulatory crusade, facts notwithstanding.

[...] As much as anything else, the economic success of the Internet comes from its architecture. The architecture, and the competitive forces it assures, is the only interesting thing at stake in this battle over “network neutrality.” And yet, the most senior economic advisers in the White House don’t seem to know what that means. They could, if they took the time. Barbara van Schewick’s extraordinary new book, "Internet Architecture and Innovation," is perhaps the best explication of this point so far for those who should be studying these hard, new policy questions.

But instead, policymakers, using an economics framework set in the 1980s, convinced of its truth and too arrogant to even recognize its ignorance, will allow the owners of the “tubes” to continue to unmake the Internet — precisely the effect of Google and Verizon’s “policy framework.”

Oblivious and arrogant. Where have we seen this before?

Craig Aaron at the Huffington Post gets into the gory details:

So Google and Verizon went public today with their "policy framework" -- better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it.

News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that's seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling on Google to live up to its "Don't Be Evil" pledge.

But cut through the platitudes the two companies (Googizon, anyone?) offered on today's press call, and you'll find this deal is even worse than advertised.

The proposal is one massive loophole that sets the stage for the corporate takeover of the Internet.Real Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers can't discriminate between different kinds of online content and applications. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies.

It's what makes sure the next Google, out there in a garage somewhere, has just as good a chance as any giant corporate behemoth to find its audience and thrive online.

What Google and Verizon are proposing is fake Net Neutrality. You can read their framework for yourself here or go here to see Google twisting itself in knots about this suddenly "thorny issue." But here are the basics of what the two companies are proposing:

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I read a couple of dozen articles about the Google-Verizon deal, and this one from Gigom seems to have the most detailed version of events:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just called off the “closed door” network neutrality negotiations it was conducting between major ISPs, Google, Skype and the Open Internet Coalition, after news broke Wednesday afternoon that Google and Verizon had reached an independent deal on the issue outside of the FCC negotiations. The end of these talks, which had been roundly criticized because they were being held in secret, may be a sign of hope for the FCC to push ahead with the public debate. However, it’s more likely another example of how powerless the agency has become.

The FCC released a statement today from Edward Lazarus, FCC chief of staff, saying:

“We have called off this round of stakeholder discussions. It has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet – one that drives innovation, investment, free speech, and consumer choice. All options remain on the table as we continue to seek broad input on this vital issue.”

The FCC decision comes less than 24 hours after hysterical and confused reports of a Google and Verizon deal on net neutrality began circulating around media outlets and Washington.

I wish I could tell you what’s going on behind the scenes and how exactly Google and Verizon plan to compromise, but the general framework seems to abandon the idea of network neutrality for wireless networks and may involve some pay for prioritization.

So far, Google and Verizon have reportedly come to an agreement that discriminating against some traffic will be permitted on wireless networks, but not wireline networks (which we should have realized already given how closely the success of Google’s Android platform is tied to Verizon’s wireless business). The deal may or may not involve paying for prioritization of content. (For a closer look of the issues they’re likely discussing check out this filing from January when Google and Verizon laid out their points of agreement and disagreement.)

Aside from the details, the bigger issue is that the FCC has been neutered, and Silicon Valley had a small part to play in the operation. Technology companies didn’t hold the knife, but they’re not protesting either, at least not in an effective way that Washington understands. All the net neutrality videos hosted on YouTube aren’t going to change things; votes and lobbying will.

So, if in the not-too-distant future, Google and the big ISPs are the gatekeepers to the Internet for media, video and applications, here’s how it all went down.

Sounds like the new FCC head completely lost control of the situation. Go read the rest.

UPDATE: Google says the Times (and Bloomberg, and the WSJ) is wrong and they remain committed to an open internet. The Times says they stand by the story.

Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil"? You can forget about that:

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.

Any agreement between Verizon and Google could also upend the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to assert its authority over broadband service, which was severely restricted by a federal appeals court decision in April.

This will have huge ripple effects on the netroots, because how are we going to compete with million-dollar astroturf organization when they have to money to push activist blogs into oblivion?