An Ignoble Experiment: ALEC wants us to cease and desist

ALEC is trying to silence us, but we're not giving in. Sign our petition telling AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to cut all ties with ALEC.

Sign the petition to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast
"Immediately announce that you have cut all ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council."

Add your name:

Dear Indiana,

This is big. Earlier this year, more than 210,000 CREDO activists signed a petition defending municipal broadband. Together, we urged the Federal Communications Commission to preempt state laws that ban municipalities from offering Internet service. The petition correctly pointed out that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is working to stop cities from offering broadband Internet access.¹

ALEC responded by sending CREDO a cease and desist letter, essentially threatening to sue us if we didn't remove particular claims in the petition from our website and "issue an immediate retraction… prominently on the CREDO Action website."² This was a direct attack not only on CREDO, but also the hundreds of thousands of CREDO activists who signed the petition.

We're not backing down. On April 9, we sent a letter to ALEC declining to comply with its demands. Our response to ALEC was covered by major political and tech news outlets, from Talking Points Memo³ and National Journal⁴ to Wireless Week⁵ and Ars Technica.⁶

Now it's time to fight back. Over the past several years more than 100 corporations have cut ties with ALEC,⁷ but AT&T, Verizon and Comcast – three companies with a vested interest in stopping municipal broadband – haven't yet publicly announced their membership status.

It's long past time for AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to permanently and publicly cut ties with ALEC once and for all.

Sign the petition: Tell AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to cut all ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council.

CREDO isn't the only progressive organization ALEC is trying to silence. The group also recently sent cease and desist letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation voters – both groups CREDO members have donated to in the past – over their portrayal of ALEC's work to stop efforts to address climate change. Like CREDO, both groups declined to honor ALEC's demands.⁸

ALEC's extreme, far-right agenda goes much further than fighting to stop municipal broadband and blocking efforts to address climate change:

"Shoot first" laws: ALEC initially gained public prominence after George Zimmerman, the murderer of Trayvon Martin, walked free because of Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law. ALEC had backed similar model gun owners' rights bills in multiple states.⁹
Voter suppression: State-level voter ID laws designed to make it harder for minorities to vote have swept the nation in recent years. Many of these laws were based on ALEC's 2009 model "Voter ID Act." ALEC's founder Paul Weyrich once even said, "I don't want everybody to vote . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."¹⁰
ALEC has also worked to block paid sick leave laws, stop increases in the minimum wage and ban the exposure of cruel and unsafe practices on factory farms.¹¹

Major corporations like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast shouldn't be funding or doing any other business with ALEC. A huge wave of grassroots pressure resulted in companies like Coca-Cola, eBay and Kraft leaving ALEC. And T-Mobile just announced a few weeks ago that it too is cutting ties.¹² It is going to take a similar outpouring of public pressure to get AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to end their association with ALEC once and for all.

Sign the petition: Tell AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to cut all ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Thanks for all you do.

Becky Bond, Political Director
CREDO Action from Working Assets

Add your name:

1. To view the petition, click here.
2. To view ALEC's letter, click here.
3. "ALEC Can't Seem To Keep Its Spats From Getting Into Public View," Talking Points Memo, April 15, 2015.
4. "Phone Company Refuses to Stop Denouncing ALEC's Telecom Policy," National Journal, April 15, 2015.
5. "Credo Mobile Ignores ALEC Order to Stop Blasting Its Telecom Policy," Wireless Week, April 15, 2015.
6. "Anti-municipal broadband group tries to silence a critic," Ars Technica, April 15, 2015.
7. "eBay Becomes 100th Company to Cut Ties to "Controversial" ALEC," PR Watch, December 19, 2014.
8. "This conservative group is tired of being accused of climate denial — and is fighting back," Washington Post, April 5, 2015.
9. "Voter ID Will Take Effect in Wisconsin--Here's What that Means," PR Watch, March 23, 2015.
10. "How ALEC Took Florida's 'License to Kill' Law National," The Nation, November 21, 2012.
11. "6 Dangerous ALEC-Backed Bills Beyond Stand Your Ground Laws," Think Progress, July 15, 2013.
12. "T-Mobile Drops Membership in Conservative Group ALEC," National Journal, April 8 2015.