Pearl Jam has always been outspoken politically, so it’s no surprise that they were critical of George Bush during a Lollapalooza broadcast. When AT&T censored the lyrics “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush find yourself another home”, Pearl Jam posted to their website in protest. Here’s the YouTube video:

Apparently this wasn’t an isolated incident and Pearl Jam’s anti-Bush comments weren’t the only political comments ATT has censored. Over at Wired Blogs, a company spokesman admitted they’ve censored others in the past.

It’s not our intent to edit political comments in webcasts on attblueroom.com. Unfortunately, it has happened in the past in a handful of cases. We have taken steps to ensure that it won’t happen again.

So much for their previous statements on not filtering information.

Lawrence Lessig has chimed in with a good commentary on how the incident applies to network neutrality. He hopes this event can be a rallying cry for net neutrality advocates to speak up again.

There are all kinds of issues at play here. Proponents for net neutrality think safeguards need to be put in place to ensure the Internet never becomes a tiered service - namely that bigwigs like Google and Amazon would have to pay more to telecoms for using more bandwidth.

“The Internet should be governed by equal access and non-discrimination,” said Christopher Putala, executive vice president of public policy at EarthLink Inc. Added Jeff Kuhns, who directs technology services at Penn State University: “Network operators should not be able to give preferences to their services over others.”

Without such protection, they argue, carriers like AT&T Inc. or Comcast Corp. could become gatekeepers of the Internet, dictating which sites consumers can access and at what speeds. Such a dramatic break with how the Internet has worked in the past could stifle innovation and competition and hurt the U.S. economy, they say.

The telecom providers seem to have the Senate convinced that this is a non-issue.

“These companies are demanding regulation based on hypotheticals,” said David L. Cohen, a senior Comcast executive. He and other executives of big phone and cable companies say further regulation could retard investment in network upgrades and limit Internet-access speeds.

Then there are the federal regulators, who already claim to have the power to investigate complaints on a case-by-case basis. William Kovacic, head of the Federal Trade Commission, told Senators in a hearing last Wednesday that the FTC already has the authority to go after those that try to implement a tiered approach. So, with no actual evidence that net neutrality is an issue, the Senate is content to take a wait-and-see approach.

According to a recent Knowledge at Wharton article, while there’s a wide range of opinions on net neutrality, most experts believe that passing legislation would only hinder things - meaning that in all likelihood, Congress would get it wrong.

Wharton professor Kevin Werbach support net neutrality but think Congress could easily craft legislation that might hinder the Internet’s development. Says Werbach

“There are really two issues in the network neutrality debate: Should government step in when broadband network owners discriminate against unaffiliated content and services, and should there be a prospective rule mandating non-discrimination? I’m very troubled by the possibility that network operators will act in anticompetitive ways against application and content providers, but I find it hard to craft a workable legal rule prohibiting such actions.”

Of course, there’s also the issue of marketability - how could telecoms keep their customers if they blocked Google and Yahoo? That seems like a strategy for mass customer exodus.

Joe Crea, writing for Legal Times, likens the struggle to a matter of lobbying. Telecoms have been lobbying in Washington for ages while this is all new to the tech community, who have been relying on grass-roots efforts to make their point.

But their anemic D.C. presence has been no match for the long-standing telecom industry, a giant in Washington’s circles that has pounded Capitol Hill and the public with an advertisement blitzkrieg courtesy of the United States Telecom Association, the industry’s chief trade group, urging Congress not to regulate the Internet.

Though the techies have managed to throw some wrenches into the debate, they’ve arrived late to the game and haven’t been able to strategize well beyond their baseline grass-roots support. Their tardiness may seem surprising, since at stake, many techies argue, is the very existence of the Internet.

“We really believe that the future of the Internet hangs on the congressional decision on net neutrality. … It’s the number-one priority,” says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a consumer advocate organization in Washington that has partnered with two unlikely bedfellows — the reliably conservative Christian Coalition of America and the liberal MoveOn.org Civic Action — for a “Save the Internet” campaign.

So, right now, it looks like the debate is dead in Congress but I won’t be surprised if this becomes an annual debate that grows as the internet evolves.

Net neutrality means that you can surf the internet without internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast requiring sites to pay a fee to make their sites download quickly.

Proponents of net neutrality see the telecom industry as gatekeepers. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) writes

Instead of continuing our freedom to use those connections with whatever content, devices and services we want, some corporations want to control what we access over the Internet. This would include giving better connections to their favored content and charging money for that privilege.

What would the world look like if the Internet had been controlled in this way a few years ago? Imagine if the students who created Google or Yahoo had been charged a fee by a phone company for the privilege of letting their potential users have fast access. These small projects would not have turned into big ideas that revolutionized the World Wide Web.

ZDNET.com columnist, John Carroll, counters

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Broadband providers, most notably AT&T, aren’t suggesting that they will “control what we access over the Internet.” Rather, they are saying that some content may be given “fast track” access into the home, access to which is contingent on a fee paid either by the provider of content or the consumer.

To consider why this might be useful, imagine 5-10 years down the road when the average size of the datapipe into the home is in the 25-50 megabit range (placing us still behind the South Koreans, but oh well). VoIP service might start to get enhanced by video that is not just the simple 320 by 240 image we are used to in the IM world, but in the Standard Definition, or even the High Definition range.

Given the time criticality of such data, not to mention the fact that such usage will vastly outweigh, from a network load standpoint, the simple text and image traffic that constitutes a large percentage of the current Internet, a fast track might not be just useful, but fair to boot. We charge ten ton trucks more for access to a toll road than standard-sized automobiles because of the extra wear and tear they cause on these roads. Why shouldn’t we make “bandwidth hogs” pay more?

Most bloggers see net neutrality from Lofgren’s perspective, as a threat to shut out the little guys at the expense of the 500 lb gorillas, and the blogosphere has been buzzing for the last few months. SaveTheInternet.com has collected over 750,000 signatures of supporters.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have doubts - Boing Boing writer, Cory Doctorow supports net neutrality but

I remain skeptical of the idea that this is a problem with a regulatory solution. The FCC is slow, often captured, and breathtakingly dumb about technology (this is the agency that passed the initial Broadcast Flag rule, after all). Asking them to write a set of rules describing “neutrality” and then enforce them seems like a recipe for trouble to me.

For example, say that your university maintained a pool of DSL lines for students, and a data-center for courseware, and created dedicated connections between them — is that “neutral?” What about Akamai: they put servers in ISPs’ NOCs around the world, and then sell mirror-space on those servers to people who want optimized delivery to those ISPs’ customers. Is that “neutral?” How will you tell, from the outside, whether an ISP is delivering slow packets to you because it’s “non-neutral” as opposed to badly managed, overloaded, or staggering from some kind of net-quake?

Regardless, it looks like the net neutralists have won a victory. Last week, a bipartisan bill favoring net neutrality and sponsored by James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, won a 20-13 vote in the House Judiciary Committee. It will soon be put to a full vote on the House floor.

Clickz.com has an interesting article summing up the issues.

Here’s how it would work. Say Yahoo! pays a fee to Verizon for preferred treatment on that network, but Google does not. Verizon broadband subscribers, who already pay for bandwidth, would then get Yahoo! pages (and ads) delivered much more quickly than Google’s. Verizon could potentially even cut off access to Google altogether.

Farfetched? AT&T CEO and chairman Ed Whitacre told “Business Week,” “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

Of course, the issue is heavily split, with internet bigwigs Amazon.com, Yahoo, ebay, Google, and even Bill Gates supporting net neutrality while the Bells, Quest, and Comcast oppose it.

Isn’t that nifty? If the telecom companies get their way, they could pick which sites load faster than others, thus preventing us paying subscribers from accessing certain websites that aren’t paying them fees.

A few weeks ago, this prompted Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to propose legislation prohibiting telecom provider from charging these fees.

Check out the Common Cause fact sheet for more info.

Stanford Law Prof. Lawrence Lessig also has a pdf transcript of his testimony to Congress last month that is worth a read.