May 3, 2015

Here's the right's supposed answer to Hillary Clinton lying to the National Review's John Fund about net neutrality and who supported it on the eve of her big announcement that she's going to add her name to the list of passengers in the GOP 2016 clown car. And of course she had to get a shot in at Elizabeth Warren while she was doing it.

Here's the way they covered it over at the National Review: Railing Against ‘Crony Capitalism,’ Carly Fiorina Makes Her Case:

The former Hewlett Packard CEO also claimed to have the expertise needed to reform bureaucracies, an important point in light of her belief that “the government is one giant, unaccountable, corrupt bureaucracy.”

She went even further than that at times, showing signs that she might run as a sort of conservative Elizabeth Warren, flashing some of the anti-corporate sentiment that has made the Massachusetts senator a darling of the Left.

“Look, crony capitalism is alive and well. Elizabeth Warren, of course, is wrong about what to do about it,” Fiorina said. “She claims that the way to solve crony capitalism is more complexity, more regulations, more legislation, worse tax codes, and of course the more complicated government gets and it’s really complicated now, the less the small and the powerless can deal with it.”

Fiorina made that point while denouncing the net neutrality regulations recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission in a 3-2 vote.

“The dirty little secret of that regulation, which is the same dirty little secret of Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or all of these other huge complicated pieces of regulation or legislation, is that they don’t get written on their own,” she said. “They get written in part by lobbyists for big companies who want to understand that the rules are going to work for them. . . . Who was in the middle of arguing for net neutrality? Verizon, Comcast, Google, I mean, all these companies were playing. They weren’t saying ‘we don’t need this;’ they were saying ‘we need it.’”

Fiorina suggested that large companies, by backing such regulations, have emerged as an enemy of the small businesses run out of people’s houses and garages. “Google started out that way too, in a dorm room, but they seem to have forgotten that,” she said.

Google did support net neutrality. Verizon and Comcast, not so much. Heaven forbid someone on the right might let a few facts get in the way of their narrative: Who's putting the most money against net neutrality?:

With the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to move forward with a controversial proposal that threatens net neutrality and the open Internet, lobbying activity looks like it has reached a fevered pitch. But for the companies involved—especially the telecom companies that are eager to be allowed to charge more for a “fast lane” of Internet service—lobbying has been at a fevered pitch for almost a decade.

Going back to 2005 (when the phrase “net neutrality” first shows up in lobbying disclosure reports), the principle's biggest opponents (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and their allies) have lobbied against net neutrality about three times as hard as the biggest proponents of neutrality (Level 3, Google, Microsoft and their allies).

To better understand the lobbying dynamics around net neutrality, we took the long view and tallied up the 20 lobbying organizations that mentioned “net neutrality” or “network neutrality” most often in their lobbying reports between 2005 and 2013. In the top 20, we found an even split: 10 pro-neutrality organizations and 10 anti-neutrality organizations. But when it came to intensity, the lobbying was far from balanced. The top pro-neutrality organizations filed 176 lobbying reports mentioning net neutrality. But the top anti-neutrality organizations far outpaced them, filing 472 reports that mentioned net neutrality. That’s a 2.7-to-1 ratio.

When we arrange the top-20 net neutrality lobbying organizations by amount of reports on the issue (Figure 1), the disparity is clear. The five most active organizations on the issue since 2005—Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the National Music Publishers Association—are all opposed to neutrality. Verizon and AT&T are heads and shoulders above everyone else, each with an estimated 119 reports mentioning net neutrality.

Go read the rest but here's the chart that goes with the article. You'll notice who is right at the top of it with the anti-net neutrality lobbying.

lobbyingreportsmentioningnn

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