Comments on: Should AT&T police the Internet?

AT&T has said it is testing filtering technology that will look for copyrighted material. But should the company be acting as Internet cop?

[jack1260]

Policing Feasible?

Anytime there is more than $500 damage to a computer, even if it is intellectual property, a felony has been committed. SHOULD POLICING BE ENCOURAGED? The only way to allow for policing is to establish the dollar amount and cut a budget from that money for governance and policing.

IS POLICING NEEDED? YES!

IS POLICING FEASIBLE? IN SOME CASES!

The service provider is responsible for any damages incurred by any customer as a result of their service provided. THis includes all services. This includes the internet.

[novelator]

Police this!

The day AT&T or any other corporate entity has their customers' interests at heart is the proverbial cold day in hell.

This is just one way to open a door to policing what we do and say on the Internet. You're a jackass if you think different.

Corporations and their excuses for doing this and filtering that are just one avenue governments explore to exert control over their citizens. Look into the Federal Reserve--they already control the US and Congress. These bankers want to run the world. To do that, they have to know everything about everyone everywhere. Filtering our internet usage under the pretense of looking for copyright violations is just another way to do that. And it is a pretense.

Nowhere do you address the customer's responsibility in all of this. Who choses an ISP? The customer. If that ISP's services wipes out a computer, who's fault is it? The customer who blundered by choosing a crappy ISP in the first place. Caveat emptor.

AT&T can kiss my royal hiney with their flimsey excuses to police and control the Net...and so can anyone who advocates such policies. Taxes always follow and never, never end.

God, and I'm a blonde, too.

Duh.

M.L. Bushman

[lim3light]

More Failure Points

Great, so now when there is a communications failure to some location or a problem accessing some resource on the internet, I have to not only go through the usual process of testing the communication channel, but I also have to worry that the packets could just be intentionally dropped due to being misidentified as carrying some kind of illegal content. I guess I'll just start telling my users that AT&T is probably dropping their packets intentionally and there is nothing I can do about it every time they complain about not being able to pull up a website or send an email, etc. It's not going to be long before everyone hates AT&T.

[nedmorlef]

Policed State

Look at the polls. Ron Paul the only candidate of any ilk with any remote desire to return America to the Constitutional values that made her the greatest nation on earth has dismal numbers.
Americans like having the gov't raise their children,steal their paychecks and tell them how to live so as to not have to make any choices on their own.
This is the present and the future for all Americans. Get used to it.

[gmtgmt]

AT&T Spy system

How strange, from wishing to avoid the obligation to do it, to wishing to operate it anyway.

Unless AT&T have decided to start wasting cash, I am guessing that they are hoping that subsequently it WILL be required to police the net - and at that point, they will be in a position to extend their services - for a fee of course - possibly even providing services to grudging rivals.

If they develop some nice little patentable search technique and manage to get the government in a few years to insist content IS policed AND it must use the AOL-whizzy algorithm, then this will be a very nice little revenue generator.

In the meantime, in the real world however, a little flurry of utilities will emerge to circumvent the filters. Even something as simple as converting newmovie.avi to passwordedfile.zip is going to pose some interesting problems - are they going to assume the right to hack a password and unzip a file to see if it contains copyrighted material?

If they are only examining packets and not storing them to "build a file", then how exactly will they try and detect anything useful from a packet of avi which has had something as simple as bit rotation applied to it - and how does a packet of newmovie.avi look different from ourwedding.avi ?

What WILL be fun is the plethora of time-waste utilities creative people will come up with that folks who do not like the approach on principle, can use to send out legal files with VERY suspicious looking packets - to give AT&T's computers a little something to do.

Not using your PC for an hour or so? Then load FlipAOL.exe and give them a load of exciting packets to examine - any torrent site worth its salt could have a nice selection of files to waste some AOL bandwidth and keep their little spybots happy when you don't need to upload / download anything else more useful.

This is going to be about as successful as DRM I suspect, but doubtless, someone "with a degree" thinks differently and reckons that his little team can thwart the combined determination of all hackers and crackers globally. I think microsoft thought they could do that with Vista - completely uncrackable apparently (giggles uncontrollably).

How sweet that AOL thinks it can do better. Bless

Mark

[JoeKoskovics]

It's a bunch of tubes, Isn't it?

Are we sure this isn't meant to give ATT and Senator Ted Stevens the justification to throttle down the bandwidth? (Remember that?)
If they "mistakenly" slow down the transmission of an unrelated video (like a live surgery for a doctor's consultation), is it really their fault? It's all in the name of protecting content!

Yeah...Right. They just think we forgot.

After all, some senator still needs his tubes for his missing email.

[ashlon80]

it's a good thing

It will boost the economy as it will make people pay the price instead of view things illegally and this approach would have prevented the strikes of the writer's guild.

[NEIL B]

att web traffic cops

if i had att i would dump them in a heart beat... even if they just thought about it...ps ..i never piriate anything.............neil

[glencain]

A BIG NO

UHHHH NO

Like we should trust some profit driven company to not run all over peoples rights with that power....yea great idea. First we filter for copyright info, then we can provide the info on who is surfing to what politcal websites. They already helped illeagally spy on Americans and were granted future immunity for it....sure trust them.

[Captain Bebops]

Big government as bad as big government

Both are wrong. Time to break up big government and break up AT&T again. Both let too much power go to their head. Break up the big media companies while we're at it too. Bring the planet back to the people.

[Captain Bebops]

Correction: Big Business as Bad as Big Government

Obviously what I meant to say but I eyes saw differently. :)

[DigitalFrog]

Looking at the question from a different angle...

If they have the capability and technology to stop illegal activities on their network and then choose not to, are they not then condoning the actions at the least and possible an accomplice to illegal actions at the worst?

I also find the title misleading (or enlightening?) Since when did AT&T become "The Internet"?

[Tin Heart]

Re:Since when did AT&T become "The Internet"?

Since they landed on Boardwalk and Park Place on the same turn (they roll doubles a lot, but always only twice in a row) and put up those little red hotels.

Don't get me started on the utilities they own. Not to mention the railroads.

[PzkwVIb]

No they are not

ISP's, like libraries are explicitly shielded for responsibility for the content they carry.

[WJeansonne]

Good for AT&T

It's about time someone took these Internet hooligans out of business, so to speak. Moreover, they screw it up for the rest of by being greedy bandwidth hogs based on their rampant thievery of intellectual property of others. And good for ATT helping the feds listen in on suspect overseas phone calls of crooks and terrorists alike.

[jltnol]

and of course..

they're listening to you as well.

[punterjoe]

Have they thought this through?

Do they really want to give up common carrier immunity? I can't imagine a more self-destructive thing for them to do.
There seems to be no upside to this decision.

[inachu]

again shaping network is fine. Sending resets is not.

Sending forged man in the middle attacks to end transmission of data is illegal.

[mbucci]

Lockdown!

Enough is enough, but it won't stop things. Since our President in league with our Corporate America, spy institutions, compliant Congress and now ISPs are on the same team there are no reasons to think that freedom on the internet is any more of a "right" than rights we lost to them in our daily lives over the past seven years. This is a VERY SERIOUS situation indeed. While the words "Orwell" and "Orwellian" have lost their potential to incite alarm, perhaps we should reinvent Mr. Ray Bradbury's model for showing us how to cope with what clearly is a growing fascism using the tools of technology for totalitarian purposes. No, I will not hide my books. No, I will not hide my opinions, thoughts and ideas. No, I will not enable these forces by censoring myself in a public venue (the internet). No, I will not be a Fahrenheit 451 person! But if the penalties for doing such make it necessary, then it IS time to "pull the plug" from the monster network or be a victim of "lockdown" - from censorship and self-censorship, from McCarthyism, from freedom-burners. All it takes is to pull the ethernet plug and turn off the wireless adapter and say goodbye to that which was once the free internet but is no more. Truly, that is a choice many of us are considering, and it is very sad but real.

[digitanomad]

Our Shameful US Duopoly

Another example of 1/2 of the US duopoly assuming gatekeeper status of something they do not own.

We are falling behind the rest of the world because of US corporate greed.

Like saying the pipeline owns the oil...

[Lord Paul]

Why don't they do something useful ???

Why don't they do something useful that all of us would applaud ??

Like filter Spam, Viruses or Malware !! Now that concerns and costs everybody money to curtail and or prevent. While filtering P to P just enriches the record companies.

[jltnol]

but the difference is...

that the utilities you mention are all metered services... the
more water you use, the higher your bill. the more power you
use, the higher your bill

But with the internet, you can use as much as you like and your
bill is the same as the guy who only checked e-mail.

I think the reason AT&T is doing this is because of the P2P
traffic on their network. This has NOTHING to do with preventing
copyright infringement, it has all to do with decreasing the sheer
volume of traffic on their network.

God forbid they actually spend some of their profits to upgrade
their network for increased traffic.. that would only take money
out of the shareholders pockets.

And of course, they don't want to go to any kind of metered
service, because they "overbook" the network now anyway, so
that would only mean less income for them.

You have to step back and look at the big picture.

This has nothing to do with copyright crap, and everything to do
with not spending money to upgrade their network.

[tonyjk3]

Absolutely Not

Last I checked, I was an adult capable of determining what is ok for myself and my children to consume on tv, radio, movies and the internet.

I don't need the government or AT&T to make those decisions for me. And I am pretty insulted that AT&T feels it has the moral authority to make those kind of choices.

And that goes the same for any other ISP looking to do the same . . . Comcast, Time Warner, I'm looking at you.

[JoeF2]

Common carrier status

They would lose their common carrier status if they try to police the content they carry.
Since without common carrier status, they can be sued left and right, their corporate lawyers probably stop this stupidity in its tracks before it gets too far.

[Ushiikun]

Agree with Several People

I can't believe that P2P is taking up more bandwidth than spam\malware\viruses. If they want to filter traffic that is, please correct me if I'm wrong, an actual crime in the U.S. I say go for it. Copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a legal one. Stop illegal traffic, fine, getting involved in a civil matter is always bad news.