Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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...
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!