Investors and Activists Hit Back at AT&T

I am starting to agree with Josh that the AT&T Pearl Jam incident may be reaching a tipping point. Maybe I've become too invested in it, but it is certainly starting to feel that way. Today, Down With Tyranny tipped me off to Trillium, a socially responsible investment firm with over 200,000 shares of AT&T common stock, who sent a letter to AT&T (pdf) inquiring about the incident:

As citizens we are alarmed whenever the free marketplace of ideas is impeded by political censorship. As shareholders we are most concerned about the impact such controversy can have on AT&T’s reputation among consumers and its good standing in regulatory and legislative communities.

This controversy arises at a particularly inopportune moment. The Company is
advocating against proposed laws and regulations that would limit its prerogatives as a gatekeeper of information flows across the internet. The Company’s defense of such prerogatives has always turned on assurances that the Company would never interfere with content passing through its pipes.

The fact that politically oriented lyrics were edited from a webcast by AT&T would appear to constitute precisely such interference and thereby cast doubt on the Company’s assurances to the contrary.

What's great about this is that Trillium is wielding its power as a stockholder and partner of AT&T to demand an accountability moment:

As a matter of risk management, we urge the Company to make a full review of and public report on the incident. Only in this way can shareholders, consumers, regulators and legislators understand why this incident occurred and be assured of the Company’s ability to prevent similar incidents in the future.

As part of that review we would like to know on what specific grounds Davey Brown Entertainment’s agent(s) decided to take the draconian step of depriving viewers of fully permissible content. We would also like to know if the Company was aware of Davey Brown Entertainment’s actions before this controversy became public. If so, do the Company’s policies require it to inform content providers such as Pearl Jam whenever such actions occur? It is our understanding that Pearl Jam was notified of the incident by fans rather than by the Company.

The company is also pursuing this through OpenMic, a Tides Center Project supported by Trillium, which seeks to establish a framework for shareholders to ensure that publicly held media companies uphold the public trust. I love the fact that we're seeing parts of a corporate social responsibility movement take a stand here (and honestly, their investments in AT&T make them a potentially powerful and effective ally). This would have been a great issue for Buy Blue.

On the music activist side, I mentioned Rock the Vote in my previous post (an no word yet on whether they will pursue this or any messaging around Internet Freedom in 2007/2008), but I neglected to call attention to the Future of Music Coalition, which has previously stood up for Network Neutrality. I've got emails out to their staff to see what action - if any - they will take on this issue. So far it's not on their site.

Putting together a one-sheet to pass around to folks might still be a good idea. Lots of information is out there, but as far as I can tell, there's no single repository that lays it all out in plain language. And certainly no one is making the argument for other musicians or youth organization to get involved. I got to thinking, though, that what we need even more than a one-sheet is a good piece of media that mashes-up some of the better stuff about Net Neutrality and Internet Freedom with contextual footage of the Pearl Jam incident. A hot, 2-minute video would go a long way to galvanizing support for this.

Matt Stoller just recorded a video with FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. It's not at all what I'm talking about, but it's all I got for now: