Bono Vs ISPs

In case you haven’t guessed, Bono’s recent remarks were about peer-to-peer file sharing. But instead of blaming music lovers for illicitly downloading songs when they should be purchasing the music, he said the time has come for ISPs tracking what folks are doing online.

“We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper bags,” Bono wrote in the New York Times. “But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.”

Bono isn’t the only one in the U2 camp blaming ISPs for the havoc brought upon the industry by file swapping. During a speech at the Midem music convention in Cannes in 2008, the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, told the audience that ISPs and tech companies have built their businesses upon the backs of record labels.

Along with raging at ISPs, McGuinness named companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and AOL as helping to destroy the music industry, even though U2 did an iPod advertisement back in the day when the band’s album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was a new release.

“We must shame them into wanting to help us,” McGuinness said. “Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long.”

Other subjects in Bono’s most recent op-ed column include quantum teleportation, soccer’s World Cup and the return of the automobile as a sexual object. You can read all about it by clicking here.