Over the past several years, I have written about how corporate front groups, largely funded by corporatists like the Koch brothers and their network of fake grassroots ("astroturf&quot groups, manipulate the media to serve their corporate bottom lines. They use this network to amplify their corporate messages, disguised as "reporting" or "news", jacking up their search engine hits, and ensuring that their slant on things dominates what you see on the internet and elsewhere. The terrific investigative journalist Lee Fang has written extensively on this, as well. You can read my interview with him HERE, my overview of his excellent reporting for The Nation HERE, and my review of his book The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right HERE. In his reporting, Fang reveals how widespread this practice is and how profoundly it impacts the news you read.

Yesterday, I got a taste of how this process sometimes plays out. Via the contact page on my blog, Eclectablog, I received this email:...

A quick look at their website showed that this was a corporate front group engaging in one last-ditch effort to derail new net neutrality rules promulgated by the FCC. As readers of this blog know, I am 100% supportive of the new rules so I was obviously not interested in what Ms. Pace was peddling. ...

So, who is American Commitment, the group behind this effort? As the title of this post implies, they are little more than a corporate front group who are funded, at least in part, by the Koch brothers and their network of astroturf groups. They are currently working to kill regulation of the big telcomm businesses that want to control the internet by stopping the FCC's new net neutrality rules.