And they are speaking out. Not against overall corporate policies or on Alcatel's ability to hash out a viable North American marketing strategy, but on Alcatel's ill-conceived advertising series featuring the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His estate and family members allowed Dr. King's image to be used in a series of digitally doctored images from the "I Have A Dream" speech, meant to convey the message that connectivity is as important as content.

Poor taste or no, I have a hard time singling out Alcatel for blame on this one. It's not that King's memory doesn't indeed represent a line in the sand that should not be crossed. It's just that I'm so battle-scarred from having dreams sold back to me in order to allow someone to sell something; it seems silly to make Alcatel the sole target of criticism. What Alcatel has done merely reflects a common sin that virtually every large technology company has committed of late.

Try to think of a song classic, from the Beatles to Iggy Pop to Nick Drake, that hasn't been confiscated in the last five years in order to sell you socks. Even worse is the "instant sellout" phenomenon of modern bands, like The Apples or Badly Drawn Boy, who sell a song to a corporate partner virtually as soon as it hits the charts. And, with full agreement between buyer and seller, who is the consumer to criticize?

We won't even get into the issue of the dot-com companies, now long dead, that insisted they were performing a "revolutionary" act by allowing you to buy useless toys in a cheaper and simpler fashion. But the moral lines get a little fuzzier as we compare two communications giants, Alcatel and Cisco Systems.

It was good to see Cisco put up some real financial support for the United Nations Development Program through the NetAid program. Nevertheless, the TV ads, which feature adolescents from all over the developing world asking us if we are ready for the future, are a bit over the top. Trying to compare Cisco and Alcatel ads reminds me of getting into the Mac-PC debates early on in the desktop industry: Sure, the Macintosh may have been preferable for graphic designers, but that didn't make Apple a hipper company because Steve Jobs wore Birkenstocks. At the end of the day, Apple and the PC-clone companies were head-to-head contenders in shysterism.

This is not meant to defend Alcatel's advertisements, which are an insult to the memory of Dr. King. But hopefully, this debate will not begin and end with Alcatel, but will open our eyes in a larger sense to the way that corporate advertising and PR departments are working constantly, every day, to steal our best dreams and turn them into branded consumer experiences.