Corporate forces use a dirty trick to undermine community activism: they steal the social movement with counter-propaganda by publishing media to redefine the movement goals. The way it works is that after a social movement names and defines itself, the corporate forces start publishing media using the same name but report that the social movement has goals which benefit the corporation. In a social movement there will be better informed participants in leadership roles who notice the scam, but most supporters in the movement are more casual and support the idea without following every turn and change in the media. The end result is that well-funded counter propaganda confuses the movement and divides the community, and whereas in the beginning everyone supported the activism now there is a camp which supports the bad guys. This is not about debate, or disagreement, or multiple perspectives. It is corporate misinformation to advance commercial interests at the expense of consumer rights.
Consider net neutrality. Tim Wu, a Wikimedian and consumer advocate, defined this concept in 2003 to mean that Internet service providers should serve consumers data without discriminating on what they are requesting. A common way to explain this to talk about previous generation telecommunication services being common carriers. I explain the concept to the general public by talking about water and plumbing: a water utility company will charge a household based on the amount of water which it consumes. For a family in a home at typical usage rates, the price of water gets metered and priced for normal use like family drinking water, showers, washing, and daily life. There is not one price for water to drink versus another price to use the same amount of water for taking a shower. Similarly, the original activist definition of net neutrality says that Internet service providers should not discriminate in how people use the amount of data they consume any more than water utilities try to regulate the way people use water in sinks versus showers versus toilets. As long as a family stays withing typical household use then it is fair to charge a rate per data or water unit. From the perspective of the Internet service provider, an amount of data which a consumer uses to visit one website is not any different for them to provide as compared to an amount of data for them to visit another website.
The problem is that media companies which sell content have a business model which depends on people purchasing their media. Data is not scarce and as countries build Internet infrastructure data is getting even less expensive. Even right now, and more in the near future, the Internet infrastructure in developed countries has the capacity for everyone to consume all the data they want. Data bandwidth is not a scarce resource. However, media companies who fear losing their consumer base to competition try to claim that bandwidth is scarce as part of an effort to direct people away from competing media and to purchasing their own. To continue with the water analogy, imagine that a shower manufacturer wants people to by more shower accessories and that they feel threatened by toilets. Big Shower lobbies the government to make water for toilet flushing more costly but that water in the shower should be less expensive. This can only happen with bizarre measuring equipment that provides no benefit to the consumer. While it makes sense to meter the water coming into a house, it makes no sense to meter how much water anyone uses in a sink versus shower or elsewhere, so the consumer should not agree to have a meter installed on their shower if the intent is to pay a different rate for shower water versus drinking water. The analogy would be for a water utility to run a marketing campaign to encourage people to pee in bathtub, saying that urban plumbing can somehow provide water to showers at a lower cost than water to toilets. This makes no sense to people who can see that using public pipes to deliver water from a reservoir to a home has a single cost. With corporate interference, though, the shower manufacturer might subsidize the water utility with payments if that utility will make metering and infrastructure changes to create a weird environment where somehow the finance system creates a corporate benefit for a few companies at the cost of absurd regulation of public infrastructure and higher prices to all consumers. The natural way to deliver water is to meter the total amount used in a household without regard to the ways in which a family uses it. It is the same for data – the cost of the data for a family to watch one movie online is the same for the data to watch a movie produced by another company. Net neutrality is the idea that consumers should pay for total metered data use. It is fine for people to pay a company for media, just as it is fine to plumb a house to have a sink, shower, and other ways to use water. Media companies are like sink and shower manufacturers; ISPs should be like water utilities who are only in the business of metering total use.
In the net neutrality counter propaganda game some corporations intentionally publish weird and misleading definitions of net neutrality. They actually publish all kinds of things – support for net neutrality, opposition to net neutrality, definitions of net neutrality, statements of support for net neutrality social movements, and legal lobbying against net neutrality. A problem with social movements is that anyone can say they join. The situation is confusing when a corporation which obviously opposes the movement says that they join. Their intent is to draw less-informed movement supporters to their side without actually educating anyone of what they are doing. In “On Net Neutrality, Here’s What AT&T, Verizon, Charter, and Comcast Say” in November 2017 Inverse reports how various United States-based telecom companies say that they are part of the consumer movement but then behave differently. Neither this article nor many of the others can see the activist situation. Lots of people try to join the consumer movement but then only come to find the talking points by the corporations, and they think they are on the consumer side. Another example with this is “zero rating”, which is the idea that corporations should give some data in a preferred way. Models for this include giving a “zero rating” for consumers to access nonprofit media for free, or for consumers to get access to movies from one company at a lower cost of data than another company. However anyone defines zero rating it is a marketing concept which is incompatible with net neutrality. Still – some corporations publish that zero rating is a way to promote net neutrality. When they do this they are writing their own definition of net neutrality.
This matters to Wikipedia because we have to sort out multiple concepts which use the term “net neutrality”. Typically there is one Wikipedia article per topic. We have an article “net neutrality”, but not “net neutrality (consumer definition)” versus “net neutrality (corporate definition)”. It takes years for a community group to organically develop a lexicon, whereas a corporate writer can create confusion with a relatively small amount of funding to disrupt the activists.
This is not just about net neutrality. It happens for lots of social movements. Another problem which I face is the counterpropaganda around “open access“. Again, activists invented and defined the concept of open access to mean scholarly publications which are free and accessible for humans and machines to read and remix. The Budapest, Bethesda, Berlin, and statements (3 B’s) are the real definitions! Publishers fearing a social movement organized counter propaganda saying that they supported open access, but then describing open access as some awful practice which is not open access. Academic publishing is an industry which captures government and taxpayer funding and for the major publishers operates in the billions of dollars at an absurdly high profit margin. They have lots of funding for unethical operations and distinctly non-academic discourse. Their conflict of interest in this space where they undermine consumers and community reform is very sad! It is never fair for corporations to run propaganda campaigns presenting themselves as unfunded consumer grassroots activists.
Watch out in all situations! When there is a community social movement which defines goals, be careful to refine the consumer perspective and support the side of good!