Consider this: One side in the debate actually went to the trouble of hiring people off the street to pack a Federal Communications Commission meeting yesterday—and effectively keep some of its opponents out of the room.
Broadband giant Comcast—the subject of the F.C.C. hearing on network neutrality at the Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—acknowledged that it did exactly that.
Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.
As if hiring people to warm seats in the hearing for Comcast employees is better than hiring people who don’t care about the issue to sit in the hearing. Equally unfair would be not allowing Comcast employees to attend a public hearing to begin with but a company willfully attempting to suppress the voices of it’s critics in a government hearing is intensely troubling.