It turns out that No Net Brutality, mentioned here yesterday, was actually the work of six students for entry into a competition and ended up costing a grand total of $173.95 to produce.
It didn’t even win the competition.
Think Progress had claimed that the No Net Brutality was an astroturf movement backed by the telecom industry. A CNET article blows up those claims and includes a quote from David MacLean, one of the six students involved in the project, who said, “The Think Progress article is hilarious.
MacLean added, “We've had a really good laugh in the last day over this. This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.”
Kristin McMurray, another student who contributed to No Net Brutality, explained further, “We have not had any contact with any telecom company during this campaign. The only funding we received was the $100 given to us by Atlas.”
No Net Brutality did disclose the $100 Atlas donation on its site.
The project came in third in the competition, finishing behind a project that supported education reform in Poland and another that dealt with sales tax rates in Washington D.C.
Comments
Re: No Net Brutality is a Student Project
Apparently you're a student project if you say you're a student project. Taliban? student project. Catholic Church? Student Project. Darma initiative? student project.
Re: No Net Brutality is a Student Project
Think Progress making shit up? No way. I don't believe it.
It's so odd that a group involved in so much astroturfing feels it can label others for it.
Re: No Net Brutality is a Student Project
Except there is a problem here. The one American involved isn't a student and the contest is actually sponsered and run by a think tank.
http://stopthecap.com/2010/05/11/telescam-exposed-who-really-runs-nonetbrutality-com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=TeleScam+Exposed:+Who+Really+Runs+NoNetBrutality.com%3F
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinmcmurray
So they aren't "students" in the traditional sense at all, unless you count being a student meaning competing in a competition for Atlas Network. Whose website is down I might add and when it was accessible it was an empty shell website with no pictures or anything.
Also if you look at their facebook page and the "student" website they have proven that they don't understand what net neutrality really is. Hell I'm a conservative and something smells rotten here because they started as an advocacy group then stated that this is a student project and now have gone back to being an advocacy group. So the question here is this website nothing more than a farce? Do the people really stand behind it despite being nothing more than a think tank project? Should this type of project be taken seriously considering how they didn't even define net neutrality even on their facts page?
Also normally school projects even for business don't have their students post their work online as it is meant to be just be graded.