AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter

[Kooperman]

For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

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[DudeAsInCool]

Bring on the lawsuits!

On another front, the FCC is looking into Comcast's P2P Blocking. According to Phawker, "the two groups also asked the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 per affected subscriber. Comcast has 9.1 million subscribers to their digital services, according to their most recently issued investor’s report. FYI: 9.1 million multiplied by $195,000 equals $1.77 trillion"

[vernarial]

I don't know about traffic cop. Seems more like FBI to me.

[DudeAsInCool]

In his excellent article, "Has ATT Losts It's Mind?", Tim Wu at Slate.com examines the repercussions of ATTs plan to filter the internet and he doesn't like what he sees. Not only does he consider the plan Orwellian, he believes the company and its shareholders will suffer, and questions the plans legality:

"AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Today, in its daily Internet operations, AT&T is shielded by a federal law that provides a powerful immunity to copyright infringement. The Bells know the law well: They wrote and pushed it through Congress in 1998, collectively spending six years and millions of dollars in lobbying fees to make sure there would be no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications"—content AT&T carries over the Internet. And that's why the recording industry sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon, when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.

Here's the kicker: To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content." Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity."

Read more at Slate