Comcast Gets Hard Up At FCC Meeting

alphadogg notes a story over at portfolio.com claiming, and presenting evidence, that Comcast paid people off the street to take up room at yesterday's FCC hearing in Massachusetts. Comcast acknowledges that it paid people to hold places in line for its employees. But Save The Internet claims that people were bussed in by Comcast and then took up almost all available seats in the meeting room 90 minutes before the meeting opened, blocking scores of interested people from attending. Such tactics are not unheard of in Washington DC, but how appropriate are they in a regional meeting on a college campus?

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

A, O, and L.

That's right, most of the Sr. Mgmt has been imported from AOL. And if you think of how successful they've been over there, you can imagine just how good a job they are going to do at Comcast.

Re:Astroturfing?

[milsoRgen]

I can't find specifics, but from this article I would wager it was probably a whole afternoon. I would of jumped at the chance to be there, and get beer money for later. But I can only imagine what Joe Six-Pack and company thought of the whole event.

Commonplace in Washington

[KookyMan]

For those who aren't aware, its common practice for Lobbyists to pay professional "line waiters" in Washington D.C.

Since lines form hours ahead of time for meetings and other public discussions, its a waste of time to force the lobbyist themselves to be waiting in line for 2-3 hours, so they pay someone to hold a place. I believe it was the Colbert Report that actually did a piece on this within the last couple of months. I think there was possibly some legislation being floated that would make some judgments on this practice.

Re:Commonplace in Washington

[bandini]

I was a bike messenger in DC for several years, and did a number of line standings. Messengers are often hired for this purpose, being familiar with the Hill offices, and being still more familiar with working as dispensable help for some of the worst people in the world.
I never liked doing line standings, though they usually paid well (relative to my average income back then); besides being deadly boring, there was always a sort of bitter ethical aftertaste, it's true. I think the last one I did was for one of the asbestos hearings; I'll never forget seeing the looks on the faces of what appeared to be genuine concerned citizens, showing up at what they thought was an early hour only to find themselves effectively locked out of the room by a ragged bunch of guys in rain jackets and shoes that close with velcro - who were only proxies for three-piece suits and wing tips, but whatever.
The deal (for whoever's interested in these things) is you show up at one of the Senate or House office buildings at some crazy hour, usually well before dawn or even a day or two ahead of time, and wait. The building isn't open yet, so you have to wait outside, and then march in to the hallway near the assigned hearing room, trying to preserve the order of the line as it was. Sometimes the hearing room is a ways from the open entrance; guys want to move up in line or at least not lose too many places, everybody starts walking faster and the line will break into a sprint. Kind of fun to run across the floor of the Hart building at 5am, bike cleats ringing on marble, but as things are generally a lot more locked down on the Hill these days I doubt if this happens much anymore.
So one problem, for the waiter, is that while this is basically an accepted practice the Capitol Hill police don't really fully condone it, either. I'm guessing that there's no clear regulations, let alone laws, covering these things, but once you're inside the cops will threaten to kick you out if you try to sit down, or leave a bag or other placeholder in line while you use the bathroom. If they catch you holding someone else's place in line (besides the one person who's paying you to be there, natch) they'll wait for the other guy to come back and throw you both out. Their right to do any of these things is pretty vaguely defined, but good luck trying to lodge a complaint.
Of course for important hearings where people are waiting for many hours beforehand, some bending of these rules has to happen, and so it does, but you have to defer to the cops by not doing it in front of their faces. They in turn give a little leeway; right up until an hour or so before the hearing, they only walk down the line once in 20-30 minutes, then as the time approaches they come by more and more often. By the time the lawyers and lobbyists show up it's a reasonably orderly scene. You're not really supposed to just have a sign out, airport-limo style, because somehow that is considered too blatant. So there's this funny school-dance thing that happens where a bunch of suits are walking up and down the line, looking for their guy or guys, both sides murmuring the names of various client firms. Once you find each other you switch out, and the cop who was diligently making sure you didn't hold your buddy's place for five minutes while he went to take a piss will stand there and watch and not say a damn thing.

I have a very low opinion of the Capitol Hill police, for reasons only tangentially related to the above, so excuse me if that colors my description; I'm just describing the phenomenon from the underling's perspective for anyone who cares to know about it.

Re:Astroturfing?

[vtscott]

Reminds me of a similar incident with a protest group against walmart.

An article in Las Vegas Weekly reports that as part of its Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign, the UFCW hired some protestors to stand outside a Nevada Wal-Mart and protest against it. According to the article, the UFCW was being hypocritical in several ways. In particular: [1] * The protest workers were not unionized.
* The UFCW paid the protestors less than Wal-Mart paid its employees. The UFCW paid the protestors $6.00 an hour. Meanwhile, the average Nevada Wal-Mart employee was paid $10.17 an hour.
* The protestors did not have health insurance. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart provided its employees with health insurance. For example, the article mentioned a Wal-Mart employee whose husband received a liver transplant, and the $600,000 cost was paid for by their insurance policy.
* The protestors were working outside in the hot sun where the temperature was 104 degrees. One of the protestors ended up suffering from heat stoke. Meanwhile, the Wal-Mart employees were working inside a cool, air conditoined environment.

Those people had to walk around in the hot sun for $6/hour so I doubt comcast had to pay much for warm butts to sit inside and nap.

Disclaimer: I'm all for protesting walmart although I don't think it's right to pay people to do it. And I think what comcast did was much much shadier.

I was in line

[GabrielF]

My colleague and I run free wireless networks in housing projects. We both schlepped to attend this event and we were both turned away by Harvard cops because there was no room. It really drives me crazy that people whose livelihood is effected by net neutrality couldn't get in because comcast paid to pack the room.

The event was run by the Berkman Center and even people who identified themselves as working for Berkman were turned away. Even a reporter who just wanted to stand in the back and take photos was hassled by the cops - I didn't stay long enough to see if they let him in. There were a lot of people who arrived around the time I did (fifteen minutes early) and insisted that someone was holding their seat, so maybe there is some truth to the part about the people holding seats for Comcast employees - but - the Harvard cops wouldn't let these people by unless they called the person holding the seat and that person came out, so unless Comcast provided their employees with the cell numbers of the seat fillers they wouldn't have gotten in anyway.

I'm so mad about this that I want to tell everyone I know to cancel their comcast service, but because of the telecom duopoly most of the people I know who have comcast would probably have to pay a lot more to switch.

I was on campus today

[ystar]

I'm a student at Harvard, and for what it's worth, I can confirm the Widener stretch of Massachusetts Ave was lined with an unusual (and infuriating) number of peter pan buses today (maybe 4-5 buses total). I had assumed it was a group of foreign tourists or a big alumni meeting (two busloads of said travelers are a common sight every month or so) but now that I know the truth, I'm fuming at the ears over this.

I'm contacting some friends in the Crimson to see if they plan to cover this in tomorrow's paper.

Re:Astroturfing?

[clang_jangle]

I would of jumped

It's "would have jumped"!