[Infowarrior] - AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter

[Richard Forno]

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

By Brad Stone

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/att-and-other-isps-may-be-getting-r
eady-to-filter/index.html

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 NBC¹s 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.

Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and
Microsoft¹s Soapbox, and on some university networks.

Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider ­ Comcast,
AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to ­ could soon
start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on
someone¹s copyright.

³What we are already doing to address piracy hasn¹t been working. There¹s no
secret there,² said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal
affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and
members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing
digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

³We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a
network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,² he said. ³We
recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising
technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content
companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies
that are out there.²

Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing
that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such
filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal
provisions ‹ uses like parody, which enrich our culture.

Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company¹s
fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly
doesn¹t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.

³The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted
materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable,
continuing status,² he said. ³The question is how we collectively
collaborate to address this.²

I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their
customers over network level filtering ­ for example, the kind of angry
outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on
BitTorrent traffic on its network.

³Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards.
There is going to be a spotlight on it,² said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.

After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such
network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in
its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer.
³We¹ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there¹s no doubt about
it,² he said.