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

don't like the law? They'll change it

[axus]

AT&T obviously has some deep government connections, they've got senators thinking that what's good for AT&T is good for America. They wrote the previous law, they can unwrite it. The trick will be how to include themselves and exclude their competitors... and I'm sure they'll try to stick people with open wifi ports too.

How to tell your management structure is broken

[HangingChad]

When really stupid ideas start seeing the light of day. That means most of the management team has insulated themselves from criticism by surrounding themselves with toadies and have, effectively, separated themselves from any semblance of reality.

Usually the case when you see corporate behavior and wonder, "How could they be that stupid?" Because on their little planet what they're doing makes sense. Just not on this world.

In my experience it also means upper management has divided themselves into warring camps.

Re:How to tell your management structure is broken

[FredFredrickson]

It's also a sign- the company has clearly chosen a strategy from the following two:

1. Side with the consumer. In the end it's their money that will make you surpass your competition.
2. Side with legislation. You can legislate yourself a consumer base, that's where the money will be.

It's sad when a company thinks they're so big that they can take option 2. It's fun when option 2 basically kills a company. I wouldn't be surprised if this type of move kills them. Think about it- they're talking about censoring the very basic service that's being offered. It's like they're trying to sell a damaged highway to people, expecting them to take it because the potholes are on purpose. People will vote with their wallets, I hope.

Well, they could ...

[Ihlosi]

To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content'

Well, neither of the criteria contains any mention of the transfer rate. They could limit "offending" downloads to 1 kB/s.

There's a more insidious possibility

[QCompson]

Maybe by the time AT&T has it's filtering plan in place, they also hope to have a wide-ranging immunity law passed by Congress that supplants 17 U.S.C. 512. The new law, passed by a Congress that is nearly completely united on their love for telecom companies, would give telecoms complete immunity from any lawsuits while engaged in "efforts to combat copyright violations."

It looks as if there's a good chance the telecoms will get retroactive immunity for aiding in breaking the law and eavesdropping on customer's communications without warrants; it doesn't seem to be a stretch to imagine that they will plan on their congress-critters to help them out in their fight against digital piracy.

Re:Encryption...

[kebes]

If AT&T actually goes so far as to automate man-in-the-middle and spoof all cryptographic key exchanges so that they can decrypt and analyze encrypted content... things are going to get interesting.

For one thing, I imagine financial institutions are not going to take kindly to that kind of action, and could probably mount a very successful class-action lawsuit.

The thing about encrypted traffic is that it could be anything, from confidential business data, to financial transactions, to launch-codes, to a screener of a new movie. As crazy as they are, AT&T will not start playing that game.

The blocking of IP addresses is a more likely counter-attack to widespread encryption, but even then solutions exist (e.g. the TOR network allows routing to servers that have no "non-tor" domain name, so the real IP address is never exposed). It will quickly become a ridiculous arms race...

Re:we've already done this to death

[Anonymous Coward]

about common carrier status

And as many replies stating that AT&T's internet service is not common carrier, dammit! They lobbied hard to make sure it was that way, because maintaining common carrier status is fucking expensive (what, you think having a dialtone every single time you pick up your phone without having a window where the phone company can say "ok! nobody make a call, we're going to reboot some switches!" is cheap?!), and because violating the common carrier rules doesn't mean you "lose common carrier status", it means you go to jail. Think about that, some guy at the post office reading your mail doesn't mean the post office stops being a common carrier, it means the guy goes to jail.

This is why they have to have special laws with exceptions written just for them that protect them from being sued!

Encrypted internet - sooner than I thought

[zerofoo]

I'm not an encryption expert, but I have used my fair share of VPN gear and tunneling software.

Mathematician friends of mine tell me that most modern encryption methods put brute-force cracking well out of range of the most modern computing hardware - even distributed cracking is extremely difficult with a sufficiently large key size.

So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?

Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?

-ted

confusing the content

[ACMENEWSLLC]

We run a medium sized network. We monitor our folks. We can also view their screen.

Something I've noticed happening a few times which I thought was interesting. I can see the screen & url that the person is looking at, and it has very questionable content.

I pull the URL from my logs and go to that page and it serves up an entirely different site.

Sort of like the webpage that has a breakout game that looks like you are working in Excel, escalation has many fronts. If you make it difficult for people to get the content one way, they find a different way. While we dis-allow e-mail for personal use while at work, and blocked webmail - people can now surf the Internet on their phones.

Why spend all this money on a war? Why not adjust the cost of a CD or DVD to be more in line with what the multitude will pay?

How is it a DVD costs $12.99
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=31042&skuId=3776596&type=product&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=3776596

But the same CD costs $12.99?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=124207&skuId=2830565&type=product&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=2830565

Shouldn't the CD be cheaper? I know I'd go back to buying CD's if they price were $5.

Re:time to fund some campaigns

[steelfood]

So they will just write another law.

One that will force every backbone owner to filter traffic. Because if one can do it, all of them can.

And henceforth, it will be named: The Great Firewall Act.

It doesn't have to be implemented directly by the government to be oppressive.