On Sunday, Pearl Jam played a concert for Lollapalooza, and AT&T agreed to webcast their concert on their "Blue Room". During their rendition of Daughter, they wandered into a version of Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall, which they often do. During this rendition, Eddie changed a few of the words. He sang "George Bush, leave this world alone!" and "George Bush, find yourself another home!" AT&T decided that these 2 phrases would be deemed offensive by the public and cut them out of their webcast.
Now, many of you who know me, know that I love Pearl Jam, so any story about Eddie, Stone, Matt, Mike, and Jeff is bound to grab my attention. The other thing that grabbed it, is that Pearl Jam is turning this into a Net Neutrality issue. For those of you who don't know what Net Neutrality is, let me try to explain it.
Basically, the phone/cable lines that the internet currently runs over are getting used quite often, and the more and more people that have websites, and the more people that use the internet, those lines are just going to get more and more backed up. Now before you go thinking that your email is going to take a few days to show up, let me state something. Currently it takes milliseconds for data to travel around the world on the internet. Even if the lines get backed up, it just means that its going to take 3/4 of a second for your email to get to your Japanese penpal, rather than 1/2 a second. But eventually, there is going to need to be an upgrade. Anyways, the phone companies, including AT&T, want to create a new internet backbone, basically an internet freeway, which will be bigger and better than the current phone/cable lines. This is great news for the internet, now everyone will be able to get their information quicker and everything will work better right? Wrong. The phone companies want users to pay a premium for their content to roll across these higher quality lines. Which means everytime you request information, your ISP will look at who you are requesting it from. If it's from some big corporation, that can afford to pay for the higher bandwidth, then you get your information lightning quick. But if you are just getting your info from some random hole in the wall website, then your traffic is going to get thrown onto the old phone system.
This means that the ISP is inspecting your data, and determining if it is worthy to get to you quickly. In my opinion, this goes against everything that the internet is based on. Take for example Google. Google is probably one of the biggest internet search engines in the world, but it was started by 2 college students in California. If this was in place back when they were developing their search engine, companies like Yahoo and AOL would have already paid for the faster service, and they wouldn't have the capital to have that luxury. Even though their search engine could search the web super quickly and get the information you needed, it would take much longer for the data to get to your computer, compared to the search results from AOL or Yahoo, so even though AOL and Yahoo have inferior products, because their results can move across the web faster, it appears that they are faster. If this was the case, why would anyone start using Google when its slower than the others. This could/would happen to ever facet of the internet. Why use Tom's MySpace when Yahoo personals are way faster?
The beauty of the internet today, is that anyone can come a long with an idea, and have an equal footing with their corporate competition. If the phone companies had their way, this would no longer be the case.
Anyways, back the Pearl Jam. The decided to make their issue an example of what could happen if you let companies like AT&T decide what information gets to your computer. If they decide that this content may be offensive, even though there is no legal precedent or law preventing it, then you don't get it. The net neutrality concept is called that so that ISPs continue to stay neutral, and the phone companies don't get to look at the information moving across it's wires, and they just let everything through with equal priority.
If you'd like additional info about the Pearl Jam AT&T thing, see this, or you can read about Net Neutrality
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