Obligitory Blog Entry : Net Neutrality and Polling Ethics

The word "ethics" gets my attention, even on a day when I have no intention of doing any serious blogging whatsoever. The following excerpt is the lead-in to a story that needs no explaination or interpretation, freeing me up for a day of serious not-blogging.

Yeah, burnout. Time to let the world spin as it will for a time, while I do a bit of "Rest and Recreation."

The Blog | Matt Stoller: Glover Park, Rip-off Strategists and Unethical Behavior in the Polling Community | The Huffington Post: "Sorry to bring up net neutrality again, but we're really in the final stages of putting the nail in the coffin for the Stevens legislation. Senator Sununu is predicting that it will be delayed into 2007, which means a rewrite of the bill and the possibility of getting an affirmative net neutrality regulation into the bill.
We're close to winning this stage, in other words. The telecom people know this, and have changed tactics. The most recent idea is to release a poll that purports to show that the public really wants the Stevens legislation passed. The idea is that rather than argue on the merits of net neutrality, an argument the telecom companies have already lost, they will argue that the Stevens bill is really really popular. Core to the credibility of the poll is the notion that the firms who did the poll come from both sides of the aisle and tha the poll is therefore bipartisan. I'll get to that at the end of the post, but I want to actually show why the conclusions from the survey don't actually make sense."