Bad Time For Censorship

Trying to stack the political plate it's way for access-tiering, AT&T flubs up and censors Pearl Jam for anti-Bush lyrics:

Bottom line -- AT&T’s vendor cut non-obscene, anti-Bush lines from Pearl Jam’s “Daughter” (sung apparently to “Another Brick in the Wall”). In other words, AT&T -- or at least their vendor -- censored political speech....

...There's a reason why this matters. In the ongoing net neutrality debate, a key issue has been whether broadband access providers like AT&T will stifle content on the Internets. After all, under the law today, AT&T is free to block or degrade content from say Daily Kos or the Christian Coalition website. It also has the ability -- i.e, the technical capability -- to do so. Despite having this ability, however, AT&T, Comcast and others have emphatically denied that they would ever block content.

But blocking content is exactly what they did.

[U]nderstand that the ability to block content is not AT&T's endgame. It’s not what the broadband companies are fighting about. For them, the endgame in the net neutrality debate is the ability to do access tiering -- i.e., cutting deals with content providers and services to guarantee a higher quality of service (e.g., ensuring Google goes really fast on the high-speed lane). AT&T probably doesn’t care about content -- it just wants money. If the Rah-Rah-Go-Stalin-Go website paid up, I doubt AT&T would much care what they post.