Whoops! Censored Anti-Bush Remark Was a Mistake, Says Ma Bell : "

AT&T, the United States' most powerful telecommunications company and perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the Bush Administration's laissez-faire telecommunications and antitrust policies -- admitted Thursday that it had made a mistake when one of its vendors censored a rock band's anti-Bush commentary in a Webcast.

Though the company says that it is working to restore the Webcast, critics have cried foul in the blogosphere.

AT&T was Webcasting the annual summer rockfest Lollapalooza when Pearl Jam's lead singer improvised and told President Bush that he should find another home. AT&T, as you can hear and see above, edited that portion from the Webcast.

Rock music has always been central to political communications of the day -- and it's hard not to try to even subliminally walk away from this incident without thinking that this was a Freudian slip on AT&T's part. It doesn't help that AT&T's recently-departed chief Ed Whitacre helped to raise at least $200,000 for Bush's re-election campaign, and had in addition previously made inflammatory comments about owning the pipes.

For its part, like any smart political player, Pearl Jam is capitalizing on the moment to shine the spotlight on AT&T's enormous power, and the easy potential for abuse.

'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,' the band wrote on its press blog.

'AT&T's actions strike at the heart of the public's concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.'

In a sense, however, the incident really highlights how difficult it is to formulate coherent rules concerning network neutrality. The 'speech' happened on a commercially-owned network, and wasn't an antitrust violation. Under the Bush administration, network neutrality doesn't become an issue until an economic/competitive abuse occurs.

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(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)