Last week, Time Warner Cable shelved the expansion of their metered billing plan in reaction to unprecedented consumer backlash. However, the tone of their announcement made it very clear they'd be returning to the plan after they "educated" all of their "confused" customers.

That education process began over the weekend, when a group called the American Consumer Institute penned a missive declaring that metered billing is a great idea for consumers, while unabashedly throwing their support behind Time Warner Cable.

Except the American Consumer Institute isn't actually a consumer group. It's an amalgamation of think tank reps pushing for corporate deregulation 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 as a public relations apparatus for paying corporate clients.

In reality, you'd be hard pressed to find a genuine consumer advocacy group that thinks Time Warner Cable's combination of low caps and high overages is a good idea. As such, groups like ACI are used by carriers to fabricate the appearance of a broad level of public support for positions that are usually not in the consumer's best interest. In recent years, ACI has been used to fight against the idea of net neutrality "on behalf of consumers."

With a number of deep-pocketed carriers (most notably Time Warner Cable and AT&T) eager to implement metered billing, the use of such "astroturf" operations isn't particularly surprising. In fact, we predicted it last week.

Of course if the arguments being made by astroturf organizations actually had broad consumer appeal, the findings therein wouldn't have to be obfuscated under the guise of consumer advocacy. Given that billions in potential new revenue is at stake, expect a significant number of these campaigns to surface throughout the year.