Today's topic is one I've wanted to blog about for a little while. The topic is ads. And lobbying.

Backstory. I'm not sure if these ads exist anywhere else. Since I'm in the Washington area, however, there are lots of commercials designed to influence staffers on various public policy topics (nothing like having your kid's Little League team sponsored by the General Dynamics E-670 communications system). Some are good, and some are bad.

A few months ago, there was a big push by something called the United States Telecom Association (USTA) for the reform of telecommunications laws. These fell into the "bad" category - the lanuage of the ads was always something like "Twenty years ago, PDA meant 'public display of affection'", featuring some couple necking in the background. The point of the ad was to get people to lobby their representatives for "updated" telecommunications laws, all because we should feel sorry that the telecom industry had to work under these outdated laws.

Whenever I saw this, I immediately became very scared, because I wasn't sure if some of the laws they wanted "updated" included the prohibition on electrocuting customers twice a day just for the heck of it. The vagueness of both the ads and the name "US Telecom Association" made me unsure if the money behind the ads was some North Korean front group.

So, about a month ago, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) came out with a separate set of ads called Cable Innovates. These ads basically indicated that the only reason the United States had won the Cold War was that the cable industry - the ones who continuously went on our house in the mid-90s to indicate that we couldn't get ESPN2 yet, but that the age of a thousand channels was just around the corner - had been innovating in some manner that involved lots of massive radar dishes. Maybe the giant radar dishes were surreptitiously beaming MTV to Siberia. Or maybe they were redirecting beams of light to prematurely age Lenin's corpse. I don't know.

Armed by this ad, the US Telecom Association struck back. This time, the ads were pretty basic - they identified who they were, and they identified the cable industry as being on the other side.

These ads really struck a chord with me, mainly since I place the cable industry, in terms of its respect for the public, as slightly better than Idi Amin and slightly below the Russian mafia (the mafia provides services at inflated rates, too, but if there's a problem with the protection, the mafia will usually make someone else suffer, whereas cable will put you on hold for an hour and then dispute that service was actually out in your area). Even though the cable industry struck back with some ads featuring something called the Phoneys, they'd pretty much lost the battle.

You know what the real frightening part is? The USTA represents companies that include Verizon, who longtime readers may remember has been sort of my own personal white whale of condo ownership (check here on the recap of the 24th).

And yet, when compared to cable, it's not even close.

Sort of the Capitalism of the Least Despicable Option.