AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for 'Transitory Digital Network Communications' — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content' but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. 'As the world's largest gatekeeper,' Wu writes, 'AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.' ATT's new strategy 'exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders,' concludes Wu."

Comments

Re:Encryption...

[AKAImBatman]

that doesn't work, all they have to know is that some ip address is serving up copyrighted material on a given port and shut of that port for that server.

I think you misunderstand how a Virtual Private Network works. The first thing you must understand is that there is not spoon^W ports. Once you realize that there are no ports, then you only need to route packets over a secure channel that's indistinguishable from valid business. Is this user networking with his small-business employer, or a pirate spreading illegal wares? Impossible to tell from the traffic itself.

Re:Who do I use for Internet access now then??

[acoustix]

This issue isn't just limited to AT&T customers. It affects everyone because AT&T is a tier 1 provider, meaning that they provide backbone access for several ISPs. They are looking to sniff *all* traffic, not just traffic of their DSL customers.

Nick

Re:we've already done this to death

[Cheerio Boy]

Does Speakeasy offer DSL in your area? That's what I did until I could go with RCN. Speakeasy DSL costs more, but they have highly technically skilled customer support people, an expectation that their customers run servers, and a rock-solid network. I highly recommend them.

Your packets will still likely go through an AT&T network and thus still be inspected.

Because AT&T is so large this will affect a good chunk of the Internet - especially US networks.

Hell their backbone runs the entire length of the us.

This map is from 2000 so it's probably much more invasive now:

http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/att_backbone_large.gif