Rather than elaborate in depth, I'm going to share the following email from Jonathin Askin, General Counsel and pulver.com. Those of us who know and read Jeff Pulver know he's a great advocate for the Internet, VoIP, IPTV, and in general moving the Internet to what it will become for the next generation. Jeff's tireless efforts benefit each of us. In that light, I support his efforts here and ask you to help spread the word.

Friends, Bloggers, Internet Communications Thought Leaders:

Jeff and I and the Internet need your immediate help.  We just launched a Marketing Contest to "Save the Internet" and need to get the word out as quickly and as broadly as possible.  The details are at . We need to make this as viral a campaign as the Internet will allow.  We need to impose upon your good graces and public spiritedness and ask you to reach out to your respective communities and spheres of influence.

If you agree with our mission (of harnessing the individual and collective genius of the Internet community to promote better Internet and communications policy), could you blog our contest/campaign, direct people to http://pulver.com/savethenet , and encourage folks to think outside the box and come up with clever, catchy, meaningful ads?

The contest itself is VERY open-ended.  We did not pre-establish what people should say or what positions they should invoke in their ads/messages.  This open-endedness is intentional.  We did not want to limit anyone's creativity or compel them to adhere to any of our pre-conceived notions of the issues, the battle, the preferred approaches.  We might be wrong in providing so little guidance, but we wanted to err on the side of allowing a wide array of perspectives. Who knows what some fresh blood and ideas could bring to the issue?

In any event, if you haven't watched television in DC lately, you might not be aware that the Bell companies, the cable companies and the media conglomerates have launched multi-million dollar ad campaigns to win the hearts and minds of Congress as it rewrites the communications laws and sets the rules that will govern the future of the open Internet.  They each claim to speak for the Internet and that, if Congress acts appropriately, the future of the Internet will be assured and protected. But, there are no ads during the Sunday morning talk shows from the true Internet innovators and thought leaders -- us.

Now, we don't have millions of dollars, but we do have access to the collective genius of the untapped millions of Internet enthusiasts and innovators.  We need to figure out how to cheaply harness that genius to take over the messaging in DC and around the world.

We are thinking the best way to do this is to encourage those Internet creative geniuses to make short marketing pieces for us, allow us to pick the best of the bunch, and start a viral flood of our own Internet-delivered ads and messages so that we can win over the hearts and minds of the legislators and policymakers.

As it is, Congress and policymakers are already falling for the Madison Avenue ad campaigns of the corporate conglomerates who are claiming to speak for the future of the Internet.

It is time for us - the Internet community -- to start speaking for ourselves.

We need soundbites of our own, messaging of our own.  We are allegedly the revolutionaries of the Internet and communications.  Shouldn't we be the ones revolutionizing the way advocacy is done and communicated in the 21st Century?  Shouldn't we be the creative forces verifying that the medium is the message?  Who better than us to harness the enabling power of the Internet to bring our message to legislators, to policymakers, to the public?  Let's throw away the old rulebook and try to think outside the box to send a message to Congress from the global community of Internet innovators and enthusiasts.

We need short creative ideas - videos, flash ads, other Internet-based gimmicks -- that might effectively communicate to Congress that they must write rules to enable us -- the Internet innovators -- to transform the Internet and communications experience.

We need to use you to help plant the seeds in hopes that a thousand flowers might bloom.  Even if we get only one great 3-minute video, that could be enough to convince Congress what is at stake as it rewrites rules that might forever shape the nature of the Internet.  That single, clever video would certainly be more than we have now.

Thanks for your time and your help.