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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."
at present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves
So they will just write another law. Do you really think that will be a problem for them to get a "children's internet safety" law passed. The government has been practically wetting themselves wanting a seemingly legal way to inspect all internet traffic, this is the opportunity. Nevermind "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" because this a non-government entity.
We are all just people.
Time-Warner cable supposidly has 50% of the bandwidth used by 5% of the users. Who wants to bet that of this bandwidth, it is almost all pirated material?
The strength of piracy on the Internet is the ease of getting the pirated material, and the ease of distribution. Thus pirated material must be easy to find. So all the MP/RI-AA has to do is find it, and do something about it. Rather than playing Whak-A-Mole on Torrent tracker servers (which are largely offshore), with ISP cooperation from AT&T it becomes possible to play Whak-A-Mole on the users of the torrents themselves...
So the MP/RI-AA or their contractor surfs the Torrent sites, and connects to the torrents with a manipulated client, verifies that a particular torrent is a copyright violation, maps the users of the torrent, and then sends an automated list of the nodes to the ISP saying "This graph is bad, any edge between two nodes in this graph should be killed", and the ISP simply RST-flood any edge in the graph which crosses its network, or just put in a router ACL to drop that pair for a while. Because the strength of the system relies on it being public and P2P, the MP/RI-AA can easily get this information.
AT&T has multiple incentives to cooperate, and can probably do it safely. It has a second party (MP/RI-AA or a company they create/contract for) do the deciding, so they dont' have the liabliity.
It keeps the content providers happy for when they are negotiating their compete-with-iTunes/Netflix video on demand and cable TV services.
It keeps the content providers from pushing through very draconian legislation, or at least draconian legislation you aren't happy with. (It can F-up your competitors, but thats just a bonus)
Its very easy to implement (short-lived router ACLs which are automatically injected and revoked).
And it drops their bandwidth bills by 30-50% by eliminating a large amount of deliberately-noncacheable (both politically and because of bittorrent encryption) traffic.
I wouldn't take it as a guarentee, but I'd almost be willing to bet that AT&T does something like this in the next year. Who wouldn't leap at a chance to reduce your costs by 30%, keep a group of "partners" you have to deal with happy, and without any real work on your part (just an SNMP-manager program)?
This won't stop closed-world pirates, but those are far less annoying to the ISPs simply because there are so many fewer of them, and less important to the MP/RI-AA because they are less likely to be users you can convert to paying customers if you make the illegal content sources unusable.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Your post outlines a possible means by which AT&T will stop bit-torrent traffic. It seems workable and realistic, and AT&T may very implement it (despite the obvious ramifications: e.g. if they block everything listed on PirateBay they will block many sanctioned/legal file transfers).
But the P2P community will fight back. It will become an arms race. For example:
-Trackers inject all kinds of bogus data into the trackers, crafted so that humans skip over it but automated crawlers choke on the massive amount of data (and RST packets!) they must deal with. For added fun, the bogus data includes IPs of legitimate company services, so AT&T will be interfering with, e.g. Blizzard downloads.
-ISPs adjust their software to differentiate "real torrents" from "fake torrents."
-Trackers begin accumulating lists of IP addresses and other signatures that detect the ISP bots, and feed them bogus data.
-ISPs use their control of IP blocks to fake requests from different IPs.
-P2P software starts ignoring RST packets, and uses a different (encrypted) protocol to open/close sessions.
-ISPs give up sending RST-floods, and instead drop all packets.
-Trackers implement algorithms that keep track of "user contribution" based on swarm participation (transmitting valid packets), and block/throttle clients with no "reputation." This makes it difficult for the ISPs bot to browse the torrent listing without actively participating in valid torrenting.
-ISPs switch to checking what IP addresses a person connects to, and simply stalls any connection (all traffic) that connects to a tracker site.
-Trackers switch entirely to TOR: they have no public IP address or domain name. All tracking requests go through TOR routing using the ".onion" pseudo-TLD.
And so on...
My point is this is a crazy arms race, and one should not enter that kind of battle until analyzing all the possible counter-attacks. And the difference here is that hackers will view this as a challenge, whereas AT&T will be spending literally millions of dollars implementing technologies that become invalidated over and over.