AT&T recently told us they unsurprisingly support the FCC's existing network neutrality principles, given they're fairly wimpy and are currently are being challenged by Comcast in court. However, AT&T isn't too keen on the FCC's plan to add additional principles that would give the FCC the ability to actually enforce them or extend them to wireless -- nor is AT&T particularly thrilled by Congress's latest effort to impose network neutrality law. As such, AT&T's circulating a new letter to employees urging them to oppose network neutrality.

The letter, which continues AT&T's attempt to conflate traffic pumping and other practices with network neutrality, informs employees that the new guidelines would "drive up consumer prices, and burden companies like ours while exempting companies like Google." AT&T's chief policy guru Jim Cicconi urges employees to head over to the FCC's broadband website, and bombard the agency with five AT&T-cooked up talking points using their "personal e-mail accounts" so it doesn't look like AT&T is pulling the strings.

The talking points are the usual contextually oblivious fare, with Cicconi informing employees that the wireless industry's so competitive, innovative and frankly awesome -- that intervention or policy adjustment is unnecessary. Given such e-mails are often designed to nudge apathetic or uninformed employees to action, the screed of course makes sure to frighten employees by linking the new rules automatically to job cuts:Essentially it's more of the same policy posturing we've grown used to from AT&T. In just a few sentences, the company manages to distort the neutrality debate, ignore its own faults and decades of anti-competitive behavior, frighten its own employees, and threaten to halt network investment if things don't go AT&T's way. Of course if AT&T wants to remain in business as a network operator, they can skimp on network investment at their own peril. A few beefed up FCC rules (likely crafted to handle only extreme anti-competitive infractions) won't change that.

Meanwhile, Multichannel News explores how a number of civil rights organizations are complaining about the FCC's decision to allow blog comments during the seven-day period when sunshine rules prevent lobbying of commissioners on public meeting agenda items. Is urging your employees to spam inaccurate talking points at the FCC website really helping the process or improving the quality of the conversation? Not so much.