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?

[dsturg63]

MONEY RULES

AT&T most likely has agreed to police the net in return for large payments from the film and music industry . Everyone should drop them like a hot coal . There too much control over everything that should be personal . They are going to continue changing the net until it gets where no one enjoys using it .
Everyone is not a thief , why should we suffer while AT&T MAKES A FEW MORE BILLION BUCKS .

[Endlezz]

Useless measures

I live in Europe, so I should not care. But anyhow, I don't think that any criminal activities will stop when data gets filtered. They will just move on to encrypted traffic which you will be unable to filter. It would only make problems worse. One day, America will be Land of the Unfree with a regime controlled by the rich, big companies and an omnipotent government.. oh wait...

[fred dunn]

When the US Postal Service reads all mail...

The World is in a state of flux right now. Whereas the U.S. would condemn anything like this going on anywhere else in the World (is China and Google a good example?) they now find it acceptable under the "guise" of "Homeland Security". It seems to me that another country use to do the same thing except they called their agency the K.G.B.
The K.G.B. used to tap phones at will, kidnap and torture people at will, inspect and monitor people's daily activities at will, and finally make them disappear or jail them in isolated camps where who knows what was happening, at will.

Wake up People. We could be talking about our government now. To the rest of the world we since 2000 have become the "Do as I say, Not as I Do" country.

I love America, but this is far from American.

[inachu]

If AT&T does police the internet

Let it only be on their part of the internet backbone.
Also make sure if they REALLY want to go that far and filter the internet then I must impose apon them then they must also scan and prevent the ability of spyware/trojans/worms/DOS attacks from happening.....
Oh that file mathes an infection! STOP IT!

Who else can do this at an enterprise level?
Mcafee and Symantec no less.
So if anything I see AT&T digging their own ditch unless they open up more bandwidth for ther applications/hardware to work properly.

[jypeterson]

Dual Purpose of Content Filtering

There are two benefits to AT&T filtering the content on their network.
1) If they successfully filter illegally distributed copyright material, it removes any potenial liability on AT&T's part in participating in that distribution. In other words, AT&T has greater protection from the content owners suing AT&T as an unknowing copyright mule.
2) If AT&T is successful in filtering this content, it would dramatically reduce bandwidth as most of the content is now video related. This leaves greater bandwidth for legitimate content as well as reducing network costs.

From a business standpoint, you can't blame companies like Comcast and AT&T in filtering content. We may not like this, but if they can successfully accomplish this task of filtering illegally distributed copyright material, it will probably be the way of the future on all ISP's.

[Clouseau2]

Actually a good thing

If AT&T were to actually ** SUCCESSFULLY ** implement this, within about 3 months all p2p software would have SSL encryption on it. Good luck sniffing that out AT&T!

[GolfNuttie]

Garage Sales, too!

OK, is the music & movie industry going to make all the garage sales in the nation and confiscate all the old VCR movies, music CD's, LPs, and DVDs being sold at them? After all, this is also copyrighted material, and besides that, they are being sold for a profit. Even Peer-to-Peer exchanges are not usually for a profit. Yep, grandma shouln't be selling her old Beatle albums in garage sales, arrest her!

[philmro]

Hey At&t can't even get it together to manage it's own server , I have been waiting 8 days to get a download for a an update for Windows 2008 for MAC and they first tell me they don't support Safari and now blame MAC and Microsoft for their system failure. Somebody call a cop but not AT&T they are the Keystone cops.