Editorial: The "American Consumer Institute" yesterday issued a press release proclaiming that the call for net-neutrality regulation was coming from the "largest and most profitable Internet firms." According to the press release, this raises "further questions about how consumer welfare is increased by imposing government price and service regulation on network infrastructure providers and not other web-centric companies with equal or superior market and financial power."

Except the American Consumer Institute isn't actually a consumer group. It's an amalgamation of think tank reps pushing a free market ideological agenda under the guise of consumer advocacy. A quick WhoIS notes that the ACI website is registered to Stephen Pociask, a telecom consultant and former chief economist for Bell Atlantic, who via groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, works to shape data that argues against government regulation of industry.

This push to frame the complicated network neutrality discussion as a battle between massive and greedy corporate titans, is a talking point repeated by most think tanks. By framing the debate in this way, the groups breed apathy among freshly "informed" consumers, who see no side worth taking in such a conflict.

If consumers were to learn about net-neutrality via one of these press releases, they would have absolutely no idea that there is - in addition to the obvious vested interests of Google and other content providers - real grass-roots concern among financially objective technologists for the preservation of an open-Internet structure. The closest thing to grass roots support in the incumbent corner are employees & investors.

Since these often anti-consumer positions (such as oh, pulling a massive new bandwidth fee structure out of thin air, de-prioritizing your non-incumbent video or VoIP service, or eliminating franchise broadband build-out requirements) frequently don't sell well to consumers, new realities are spun via "independent research" by industry think-tanks with absurdly misleading names.

These reports are ultimately gobbled up by lazy journalists for injection into the broader discourse as objective fact.

If the arguments being made by astroturf organizations actually had broad consumer appeal, such frequently myopic and one-sided "findings" wouldn't have to be obfuscated under the guise of consumer advocacy.