AT&T Censors Pearl Jam: Nothing to do with Net Neutrality

Seems like the Net Neutrality crowd will use just about anything as a football for their cause. But by using poor examples of alleged violations, they're probably just confusing the Network Neutrality issue even more than it already is.

The latest example has me (gulp) siding with AT&T. AT&T (or one of its contractors, as it claims) edited out some anti-Bush lyrics ad-libbed by Eddie Vedder during a Pearl Jam show webcast at the AT&T Blue Room site on Sunday. Read a complete account here. See the Pearl Jam performance here.

That isn't a network neutrality violation, folks, because AT&T was just (stupidly) censoring one of its own Web sites. If AT&T the broadband provider had blocked, slowed, or otherwise interfered with a webcast from, say, Yahoo, that would be a huge Net Neutrality foul. There's a big difference between those two scenarios.

So while I agree that control of the big broadband pipes has been consolidated to far too few players in the U.S., the Vedder incident just isn't a good example of those players abusing their (regretable) roles as gatekeepers to the Internet.

Meanwhile, the Vedder incident confuses net neutrality with censorship in the minds of voters, which doesn't bode well for future passage of Net Neutrality legislation. Advice to Net Neutrality advocates: be patient, be watchful and pick your shots. That alone might keep the big broadband providers honest: Big Telco says net neutrality is a "solution in search of a problem" -- let's keep it that way.

And one other thing: Eddie Vedder's really short.

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