When this effort begins to shift from ‘asking’ and ‘urging’ AT&T to ‘do the right thing’ and waiting for ‘assurances’ that they will fulfill policies and ‘regulatory guidelines’, to ‘insisting’ and ‘demanding’ that they stop interfering with the provision of fundamental rights of people to communicate, then these efforts will make great strides in becoming truly effective in achieving the goals they are dedicated to achieving. As uncomfortable as a process this is likely to be, I think it will become unavoidable in truly confronting the real nature of the problem being faced here.

For instance, whether the ‘company has in place adequate procedures to prevent unauthorized political censorship’ is in the end irrelevant. The petitioners behind this effort also claim that “To be meaningful, a policy that disallows political censorship must be combined with procedures that ensure compliance.”

Yes, and those procedures must include the foundational stone of core legal and civil rights which provide for the preeminent fundamental rights of human beings to communicate.

I readily admit such a statement can sound like fuzzily warm and flowery high minded rhetoric the state of which we may all want to assume to be a given. We can believe that these principles are already well understood and incorporated (no pun intended) in our legal and civic structures, especially with their pronounced reiteration in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 19), the declarations of the World Summit on the Information Society, even our own and increasingly maligned First Amendment. However, these rights cannot be supported only in the courts of public opinion as asked for by the people involved in the effort referred to here, but will need to be clearly defined, established and protected in the judicial courts of this nation (and the world) if we are to eventually have meaningful success in the endeavors envisioned here.

The unpleasant fact is that these rights do not really currently exist, or at least only to the degree that they are treated as being subservient to their usurpation by fictional entities of corporations, entities which are allowed to apply these laws protecting those very same human and civil rights and wield them for themselves. This will be legally justified by trumping human rights laws with property rights laws, which AT&T will continue to do here (and most likely effectively so, if past history is any indicator) in order to transcend any meaningful accountability to the goals being asked for by this public petition.

Don’t get me wrong. This is encouraging to see the shareholders of this corporation take this stand and work to change the decision making processes of this corporation and the roles it is playing and the effects it is having on the free flow of information and communication in our society. A heartening response.

My point, however, is that voluntary compliance or self-regulating mechanisms within these entities such as AT&T does not challenge the fundamental problem of these entities wielding any of these rights in the first place. The Civil Rights movement would not have been content to allow for ‘voluntary’ or ’shareholder’ policies that provided for equitable treatment of minorities, in which the ‘market’ will decide who is rewarded for providing for basic civil and human rights or not. That would seem laughable on the face of it in retrospect, yet that is the same attitude we take when we cede our society’s right to decide over the wielding and implementation of fundamental rights of information and communication to governing minorities hiding behind the edifices of corporate governance structures today. Why should AT&T have any more right to decide who can communicate what to whom or to serve as gatekeepers of this kind of civic process, than to be able to decide those same rights to these functions based on the color of a person’s skin?

Read the Open Letter to AT&T by Steve Lippman, Vice President, Social Research and Farnum Brown, Portfolio Manager of theTrillium Asset Management Corporation.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media