AT&T Plays Gatekeeper. Censors Pearl Jam.
August 9th, 2007 by tkarrOver the weekend AT&T gave us a glimpse of their plans for the Web when they censored a Pearl Jam performance that didn’t meet their standard of “Internet freedom.”
During the live Lollapalooza Webcast of a concert by the Seattle-based super-group, the telco giant muted lead singer Eddie Vedder just as he launched into a lyric against President George Bush. The lines — “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush find yourself another home” were somehow lost in the mix.
| Pearl Jam: Seen But Not Heard |
“What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band,” Pearl Jam band members stated in a release following the incident.
Indeed. AT&T routinely rails against Net Neutrality as a “solution without a problem.” They say Net Neutrality regulations aren’t necessary because they wouldn’t dare interfere with online content. At the same time they tout plans to become gatekeepers to the Web with public relations bromides about “shaping” Web traffic to better serve the needs of an evolving Internet.
Such spin needs to be held up to the light of experience. AT&T’s history of breaking trust with their customers includes handing over private phone records to the government, promising to deliver services to underserved communities and then skipping town, pledging never to interfere with the free flow of information online while hatching plans with the likes of Cisco, Viacom, RIAA and MPA to build and deploy technology that will spy on user traffic.
| No Gatekeeper: One Fan’s Perspective |
The moral of this story is never trust AT&T at their word. The company acts in bad faith toward the public interest and will do whatever it can get away with to pad it’s bottom line — including sacrificing the freedoms its users have to choose where they go, what they watch and whom they listen to online.
Our friends at the Future of Music Coalition have done great work to mobilize hundreds of rock bands against such censorship but it’s a threat that concerns everyone.
AT&T’s vision of a better Internet – “Your World Delivered” — is not one that is shared by the more than 1.5 million people who have spoken out in favor of a neutral, affordable and accessible Internet for everyone. For us the Internet isn’t about one company delivering our world. It’s about simply offering a high-speed connection at reasonable rates — and then getting out of our way.
August 9th, 2007 at 11:44 am
[…] regime’s now-legalized warrantless surveillance and data mining program. This company has a legacy of bad action in almost everything it does, and you simply cannot trust them to do the right […]
August 9th, 2007 at 11:50 am
[…] (h/t: Down with Tyranny! and Save the Internet.) […]
August 9th, 2007 at 11:57 am
When are we going to wake up? “Trust me” means “Don’t check up on me nor hold me accountable.” This has come to mean, “I’m going to break the rules and you won’t be able to do anything about it.” “Trust me” has as much meaning anymore as “I take full responsibility.”
August 9th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
[…] on AT&T and other telecoms power to “mute” voices here. 11:44 am | […]
August 9th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
[…] the rest here […]
August 9th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
[…] I honestly haven’t been paying attention), but who the hell censors them? At Lollapalooza? From Save the Internet: During the live Lollapalooza Webcast of a concert by the Seattle-based super-group, the telco […]
August 10th, 2007 at 10:45 am
The media consolidation epidemic is out of control. “We The People” can’t allow AT&T to step into a totalitarian role as the gatekeeper of the Internet. This issue strikes at the very heart of the 1st Amendment. Join the fight w/ SaveTheInternet.com and check out my blog for more:
http://robdubinski.wordpress.com/2007/08/10/att-censors-pearl-jam-aka-%e2%80%9ca-free-market-of-ideas%e2%80%9d/
RD
http://robdubinski.wordpress.com/
August 10th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
[…] SaveTheInternet: During the live Lollapalooza Webcast of a concert by the Seattle-based super-group, the telco […]
August 10th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Don’t worry, the FCC is always watchin’ out for the little guy:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2007/08/beltway-comix-comeback-of-monopoly-gang.html
August 11th, 2007 at 5:44 am
i have loved and supported Pearl Jam with all of my heart for 16 years. theses guys are true patriots, and great americans. who else would appear before a senate committee on the capitalism-run-amok mega corporation Ticketmaster? few would, and few did.
AT&T is part of the evil empire…why is anyone surprised at this?
August 11th, 2007 at 8:41 am
[…] and did I mention that AT&T openly censored Pearl Jam recently because their “performance that didn’t meet their standard of ‘Internet […]
August 11th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
[…] And yet, one ridiculous sounding pro net neutrality argument got a full turn around just recently. It’s the argument is that corporations could censor the web. Why isn’t it silly anymore? It appears that AT&T has done just that, just this week it was reported that AT&T censored anit-Bush lyrics during a webcast of a Pearl Jam concert. […]
August 12th, 2007 at 10:25 am
[…] Save the Internet blog is reporting that AT&T censored a concert by Pearl Jam over the weekend. This, of course, does not surprise any of us who have been following the Net […]
August 14th, 2007 at 4:02 am
How ’bout pulling the plug on AD&D
Or, another alternative: The “freenet” for everyone, with congressional protections and the like. http://fnt.yoursite.com/ . I like that.
Also, um, how is it that the US congress or a US based company can control the WHOLE WORLD WIDE WEB??? For the whole world??? That’s just crazy.
I say we all just boycott AT&T and all their related services - eternally. They screwed us all over on the whole cell phone thing, now they’re trying to screw everyone over this way too? We have to stop them. Hit them in their pocket books. Let ANOTHER, BETTER, BIGGER, AND RICHER company (like one we can all build together, perhaps???) take over THEIR NEW MARKET and then set things to rights.
PEOPLE, TAKE BACK THE INTERNET!!!
August 15th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
[…] The Save The Internet blog recently posted a story about how AT&T censored Pearl Jam in a recent broadcast of its Lollapalooza concert. As the blog says: During the live Lollapalooza Webcast of a concert by the Seattle-based super-group, the telco giant muted lead singer Eddie Vedder just as he launched into a lyric against President George Bush. The lines — “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush find yourself another home” were somehow lost in the mix. […]
August 15th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
yeah, whatever happend to free speech people!, why cant he bash bush, its his opinion obviously at&t has some sort of government link with all of this or supports bush 100 percent. Imean its just not fair why can the big dollar companies do whatever they want, i agree that we should go on a strike to stop buying there products and services, ill bet you theyll start listening to us then. Its crazy, now they are cencoring the web?! there is no escape form them, no one should support this.
August 15th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Now AT&T is moving from censorship to surveillance. All the more reason to spread the word about Net Neutrality!!
http://robdubinski.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/att-from-censorship-to-surveillance/
August 16th, 2007 at 9:09 am
[…] control over another network — the free flowing Internet. Look no further than AT&T’s recent censorshipof a Pearl Jam concert webcast, just as lead singer Eddie Vedder launched into a critique of […]
August 16th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[…] This is why the phone companies want to get into cable, and why they are trying to kill VOIP. This is why they are actively fighting net neutrality and censoring the Internet. […]
August 17th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
[…] BitTorrent traffic and now allowing seeding (uploads). This comes just after a conspiracy that AT&T played “gatekeeper”, when blocking a Pearl Jam performance. Welcome to the non-neutral […]
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:59 pm
[…] AT&T Plays Gatekeeper. Censors Pearl Jam. […]
August 28th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Cameras everywhere, limited use of internet, expensive booze due to failing economy. What is a person to do?
August 28th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
[…] In More News That Enrage, I bring you AT&T censoring a Pearl Jam concert because one of the lyrics to a song talked about Dubya in a … […]
September 10th, 2007 at 3:58 am
[…] Un mois après que Pearl Jam ait été censuré par At&T aux États-Unis pour avoir critqué Bus…, voici que maintent au Québec, Xavier Caféïne est censuré par Telus parce qu’il critique le concepte même des drapeaux (et en particulier le drapeau du Québec) dans sa chanson <<Les corbeaux>> au Festival Osheaga hier. Vous pouvez le constatez par vous-même au site de Telus en regardant le show de Xavier Caféïne à 7min45sec Telus censure les paroles de Xavier Caféïne. Le choix de censure de Telus est très intéressant. Quand Xavier parle du drapeau anarachiste Telus ne censure pas mais quand c’est le drapeau Québecois alors Télus censure. […]
October 28th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
[…] (Catherine Crump, ACLU) wrote an interesting post today on AT&T Plays Gatekeeper. Censors Pearl Jam.Here’s a quick […]
January 27th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
It kills me every time I see people on the internet commenting about “They (AT&T) apologized, are making good, it wasn’t AT&T, they just didn’t want to get into the middle of the politics”, etc. Not here at savetheinternet.com, but on more general access blogs.
To anyone who thinks this was a “mistake” by a third party vendor, or that AT&T has ANY problem with being in the middle of a political agenda: given AT&T’s history with the Bush regime, wiretapping, NSA, etc, AND then taking the subject matter which was censored into consideration, if you can say with a straight face that this was just an overzealous “third-party” and not AT&T… You are a better liar than most.
Yes, they released the censored footage uncensored. But you know what? It was released after the fact, missing its moment of peak emotional impact (when everyone was watching it being sung online). Then AT&T can say “Look, we made good” and try to look like the good guys while dramatically reducing the impact on their good friends, Premier Bush and Co.
Quite brilliant, really.
Some people need to pull their heads out of the sand.
Just because it is not covered under the First Amendment AS WORDED, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t strike at the heart of the First. I am quite sure that something like the Internet had never even been imagined when the First was written. Nor did they envision a situation where the biggest source of censorship is NOT the government, but private corporations that own all of the dissemination channels. Remember, at the time, the government WAS the biggest source of censorship, and The Right we enjoy of Free Speech only matters one bit if we can get our message out to others. And once your blogs are censored as they go across AT&T’s internet pipes, what then?
I mean, come on, people. Wake up. The problem with this is not so much what is going on today, but how far they could reach tomorrow if we don’t say STOP, right here and now. Just imagine how much content would actually get through if anything offensive to anyone was filtered at the (internet) network level.
The roots of the problem are apparent even in this thread. Nearly any idea will have both proponents and opponents. So, it stands to reason that nearly everything can be construed as offensive to SOMEONE. If you filter the offensive content, just what does that leave, exactly?
And that’s not even taking into consideration the rest of the world. How long to you think that free-thinking countries in the rest of the world are going to put up with US censorship of things? I imagine that the solution for them would be to simply isolate the US from the rest of the internet (if we didn’t do it ourselves first).
And the scariest part is that none of this happens overnight. It is one baby step at a time, so slowly that people not paying attention will never even see it, until one day, there is no more free speech, no more content being broadcast anywhere that isn’t sanitized and pre-approved by a few big conglomerates.
If you don’t have a problem with that vision, then please have your head checked by a professional.
February 13th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
[…] August 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President […]
February 24th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
[…] example that we can’t even trust Ma Bell not to read our email or listen to our phone calls, or censor our webcasts, or allow our torrent streams to operate correctly, or to even be free to criticize their […]
May 13th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[…] is a form of censorship, but what about political censorship? During the live Internet stream of a Pearl Jam concert in 2007 the lead singer was muted just as he sang lyrics critical of George Bush. There are many […]
July 16th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
[…] August 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President […]