Who’s Funding Net Neutrality Mobilization Efforts? Not Fully Known

Government watchdog groups we contacted raised concerns about the lack of disclosure in the funding of efforts that could influence the future of the Internet. They also said it reflected the rise of “social welfare” organizations that the watchdog groups have criticized as preventing the public from knowing the source of money influencing elections and policy decisions. Others, including former FCC commissioners, were less troubled. They said the agency’s decisions will hinge on the merits and legalities of the arguments, and it’s little mystery at this point where the interests stand.

American Commitment touted in a news release that it had urged more than 2 million people through social media to file comments against what Kerpen called the “nuclear option” of a Title II Communications Act approach of reclassifying broadband as a common-carrier service subject to more rules. As an IRS-designated 501(c)(4) organization, the group, like others with the same status, doesn’t have to disclose donors. Kerpen declined to say if industry groups or others with a stake in the net neutrality debate are contributing to its effort. The group doesn’t disclose its funding, Kerpen said, because “in the current political climate, conservative donors have been pilloried” and are in jeopardy of becoming the target of protests. The Center for Responsive Politics cited American Commitment as a player in the rise of social welfare organizations in national politics.

Free Press, a 501(c)(4) group, helped organize Wednesday’s Internet slowdown demonstration, which claimed to have generated more than 700,000 FCC comments and 2 million emails to Congress (CD Sept 12 p11). The group gave partial information about its funding. It’s at the core of Free Press values not to accept money from businesses, and especially corporate interests with a stake in the issues it works on, said Free Press Senior Director-Strategy Timothy Karr.

Limited Disclosure

Some groups seeking Title II net neutrality rules list certain contributors, but not all.

Free Press gets its funding from foundations and from mostly small donations from individuals, said Karr. He pointed to its 2013 annual report (http://bit.ly/1pcX9gl), which lists the top 20 donors to Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund. Among them was the Ford Foundation, which Karr said is the group’s largest funder, and the craigslist Charitable Fund. The group does not release the names of its individual donors or three institutions that opted to remain anonymous, the report said. “These donors ask not to be listed publicly, so they don’t get unsolicited submissions from other organizations,” said Karr. None of the three institutions or the unnamed individuals are among the top-20 donors, he said. “It’s their right to give anonymously, even though we would prefer they all allow us to publish their names.”

Fight for the Future’s website has a sampling of those who've given more than $1,000 (http://bit.ly/1wmBGKn), including CEA, Private Internet Access, Yelp and WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg. Not all those who have given more than $1,000 are displayed on the page, said Holmes Wilson, Fight for the Future’s co-director. The two other organizers of the demonstration, Engine Advocacy and Demand Progress, did not respond to our inquiries Thursday or Friday. Fight for the Future raises about 25 percent of its funding from small dollar contributions, and the rest from foundations, large individual donations and businesses, Wilson said.

"One of the really interesting things about comment periods” that involves advocacy groups and trade associations, is whether a filing “really comes from the public or if they come from special interests,” said Bill Allison, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation. Not knowing who’s funding the mobilization efforts “leaves the public really in the dark,” he said.

Campaigns “for and against particular regulatory proposals share many features with electoral campaigns,” said Viveca Novak, a Center for Responsive Politics spokeswoman and co-author of a report it wrote on American Commitment. “Groups will spend millions trying to persuade the public to take action supporting their views -- whether it’s through a form letter during a public comment period or a vote on Election Day.” The report linked American Commitment to major Republican donors David and Charles Koch, and said it spent nearly $2 billion in ads in the 2012 presidential election, as well as in the Arizona, Ohio and Virginia Senate races (http://bit.ly/1qLU7n6).

Kerpen said he has no problem that groups on the other side of the debate are also raising money without fully disclosing their funding, saying all the organizations are “sincerely ideologically motivated” and not at the will of particular companies. Both sides try to raise money and advocate based on the merits of their arguments, he said.

Some Don’t Care

Some are unfazed by the lack of disclosure.

"Frankly, I don’t care” whether big donors contributed to a mobilization effort, said former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth. Knowing if big-money donors are behind an effort shouldn’t matter, he said. “Government should look at each comment that comes in and treat it with equal weight.” It would be better if the groups’ funding were transparent, said ex-FCC Chief of Staff Blair Levin, but given the disclosure rules, “I can hardly blame anyone for using that tactic.” He now runs Gig.U.

There’s “always something fishy when someone is not disclosing where their money is coming from,” said Pablo Molina, adjunct professor for Georgetown University’s master of professional studies in technology management program. The lack of disclosure may hurt the organizations, said Tom Martin, a lecturer in the same program. Commissioners reading comments “are aware of who’s credible and who’s not,” he said. “But if a commenting body keeps [their source of funding] under wraps, there’s awareness of their credibility problem.”

Groups that “pump anonymous money into a House or Senate race, and then vanish without a trace, make it harder to know (a) what they stand for and (b) what they expect to gain from the outcome,” emailed David Karpf, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s school of media and public affairs who focuses on strategic communications. That’s less important in a public comment period than in an election, he said. “We know who these organizations are and what they stand for.”

A 2009 net neutrality proceeding generated 116,636 filings in docket 09-191, short of the more than 1 million filed this time. Karr and Kerpen agreed the mobilization efforts outstrip the 2009 efforts by media reform groups and Americans for Prosperity, with which Kerpen said he works. “It’s much higher in the order of magnitude.” The increase is due to several factors including a growth in the number of advocacy organizations doing online activism and “the growth of social media as a means to spread the word about advocacy issues,” Karr said. The sense that “regulators are increasingly using the number of commenters as justification for more policy positions” was fed by an FCC news release after the 2003 net neutrality order, which cited a large number of comments, Kerpen said.

American Commitment doesn’t have the mobilization capacity of the groups it’s competing against, and doesn’t expect to generate as many supporters on its petition as the comments the pro-Title II groups are generating, Kerpen said. The group doesn’t want to cede battle over comments to its opponents. “It’s a mistake to let them claim they speak for the American people,” he said. “We can at least show very large numbers of people opposed” to what he called the “nuclear option” of Title II.

Levin was unsure if the efforts would be effective. “It is somewhat a case of first impression for this kind of tactic, so I hesitate to guess,” Levin said. “The role of the commission isn’t to treat every comment the same and give it identical weight,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “There is some judgment involved.” Depending on the merits of the case, the commission shouldn’t simply go by the number of comments it receives, he said. “The commission is not supposed to be automatons, simply tabulating the public comments.”