Interview with AT&T on BitTorrent Filtering

An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is running an interview with AT&T's Vice President of Legal Affairs, Jim Cicconi. AT&T discusses the latest in their effort to filter, however one interesting point tends to show they aren't moving anywhere until they discuss this with their customers. "We hear from our customers directly and indirectly. It's a very competitive business, ravenously so. I think our company is very, very sensitive to customer attitude — we have to consider this," Jim Cicconi told Slyck.com."

Comments

Hey slick

[Loki_1929]

Forget your customers, get your ass down to the local library and get your hands on the text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act right NOW. You're opening yourself up to upwards of trillions in liability if your filtering doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time. You're also opening yourselves up to massive liability with the federal government (hint: take a quick look at Comcast vis-a-vis Bit Torrent).

Quit spending all day being a PR monkey and get back to being a lawyer for your company. You're giving bad advice that has the potential to obliterate your employer.

Re:Hey slick

[despe666]

I'm not worried about them, they'll just buy themselves another custom-made exception in Congress.

Re:Hey slick

[Planesdragon]

You're opening yourself up to upwards of trillions in liability if your filtering doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time What?

No system on earth works 100% of the time. And the law never expects it to. Maybe, MAYBE I could see a case for even 300% punative damages above actual loss if AT&T somehow has Strict Liability now (you know, the kind that handlers of explosives deal with), but i can't imagine even a billion dollars in actual damages due to AT&T misfiltering.

Care to cite what part of the DMCA is so terrible?

Re:Hey slick

[afidel]

The safe harbor provisions. By selectively filtering content they are no longer a common carrier and are thus part of the content serving chain and are thus liable for "providing" each and every piece of content that successfully flows through their system. It's right there in black and white in a document that they and the content industry wrote, they figured that banning the act would be sufficient so they wrote it to fit their existing business model. Now they think they can make more money by not expanding capacity and therefore want to eliminate one of the more bandwidth intensive uses of their network.

Re:Hey slick

[Fordiman]

Well, I'm not an AT&T customer - I'm on Verizon - but I'll say this: if my pipes start getting filtered, I'm switching to Earthlink, post haste. It's a pain in the ass to switch DSL carriers, but there's no way in hell I'm letting some corporate monkey stick a valve on my pipes that I don't control.

I pay for 3 MBits. If I feel it's necessary, I will flood that line with as much data as I please. You want to throttle it? Fine, but I'll want a prorated refund for the average difference between allotted and used bandwidth in a given month.

Neither of us are going to get what we want, playing this game, so we wouldn't maintain a business relationship.

Re:Hey slick

[ScrewMaster]

By selectively filtering content they are no longer a common carrier

So far as data services are concerned, ISPs are not common carriers and never have been.

Re:Hey slick

[afidel]

Hmm, well the DMCA safe harbor provisions are very similar to laws protecting common carrier as is the definition of a service provider similar to the definition of a common carrier:

Question: What defines a service provider under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)?

Answer: A service provider is defined as "an entity offering transmission, routing, or providing connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received" or "a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities thereof." [512(k)(1)(A-B)] link

I would say that appear very similar to the definition of a common carrier and that filtering content precludes protection under the statute =)

Re:Hey slick

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, there's a lot more to being a common carrier than legal immunity. There are also the regulatory burden and quality of service standards under which a common carrier must operate. That's why the big boys decided that they'd get matters adjusted so that, as data services, they wouldn't have to deal with that expensive, consumer-oriented nonsense. They figured it was a fair deal in exchange for not having immunity to lawsuits arising from the use of their equipment.

Re:Hey slick

[Anonymous Coward]

The end game is content control without responsibility. A 'new' broadcast model. What they don't realize is that while most of the bits may be glommed entertainment as torrents, the internet and most of the customers is about information sharing and communication.

EDGE

[Mr. Underbridge]

"If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for. Overwhelming usage is from BitTorrent traffic. No one wants to get to the point [where] we say, "You can't do that."

Oh, now I get it. They think that's why EDGE is slow. Kind of cute in a retarded kind of way.

Do they think EV-DO users aren't using P2P or something? Perhaps if they upgraded the network instead of locking it down, it might work better for them.

Re:EDGE

[Anonymous Coward]

The ploy will be to tell customers that they will have a much better experience and cheaper internet if ATT filters out the noise. I guess what the carriers were shooting for when they lobied for more tax breaks and exclusive franchises in certain areas. "We will provide greater bandwidth and service for everyone and invest in upgrades to our networks if this bill passes and you approve of this monopoly franschise agreement" and in small print "there will be very little actual bandwidth added, we are going to limit the bandwidth and applications that people use to achieve our goal of more bandwidth"

I guess more bandwidth actually means less bandwidth but that less bandwidth will be delivered in a shorter time period.

Re:EDGE

[Anonymous Coward]

'cell' isn't a reference to cell phones.

Re:EDGE

[stinerman]

Yes, the Internet is faster for YOU if no one else does anything other than check their email. In fact, it's faster for everyone if everyone just doesn't use it. Look at all that theoretical capacity!

Re:EDGE

[PopeRatzo]

"We will provide greater bandwidth and service for everyone and invest in upgrades to our networks if this bill passes and you approve of this monopoly franchise agreement"

First, agree to never give any sort of customer information to the government without a court order, then we can talk. Until then, AT&T, just stick to the agreements you've made with your customers. And if that agreement was "unlimited internet", don't whine about how much I use.

It's funny how deeply caring and concerned about customers AT&T is when they're getting ready to fuck them over. They didn't seem to care so much when they bent over and handed our data to law enforcement without a judge's order.

Re:EDGE

[IamTheRealMike]

I really doubt he means cell towers. The word "cell" can refer to a lot of things, and how many people do you know that run BitTorrent over their mobile phone? He probably is talking about local cable internet POP.

The point about upgrading the network is moot. Every ISP I ever talked to has said that P2P traffic expands to fill the available space. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth you throw at it. You'll always flood your pipes with P2P traffic.

Anyway, the interview is pretty interesting. I'm trying hard to figure out if the AT&T guys genuinely believe the stuff about having a moral responsibility to do something about illegal content travelling over their pipes, or whether it's a cynical cover for some other business reason. I can well believe it's both actually. These guys are probably in their 50s or so. They probably were never absorbed into the "information wants to be free dude!" culture that is prevalent in under 35s. I suspect their views on morality and copyright law might seem quite old fashioned to a lot of us here on Slashdot - regardless of whether they work for AT&T or not.

Let's assume they're basically honest people, who just have very different views of the world to most of us. Most of the times I've thought people were "evil" that turned out to be just childish naivety on my part. Usually, I just didn't understand their position.

So they see a small number of their customers basically flouting the law, and using up disproportionate resources whilst doing so. It doesn't surprise me that they might feel annoyed or even outraged about that.

And now the industry has backed itself into a corner because everybody is selling "unlimited" subscriptions and trying to sell a "10mbit/sec with a max cap of X GByte/month" just won't fly becaus nobody really understands what "X GByte" equates to. Regular Joe Schmoe has no clue how much a YouTube video would count towards his cap for instance, and probably most Slashdotters don't either. So no consumer ISP is going to talk about this stuff except in the fine print, which leads to people jumping on them for misleading advertising, etc.

I have to admit, if I were an ISP owner I don't know what I'd do. I could try selling a subscription in which BitTorrent traffic was banned, so that people who don't use it can get cheaper and more reliable connectivity, but that implies regular people understanding stuff like "WoW uses BitTorrent" (which imho is a stupid idea anyway ... why the hell is Blizzard abusing my upstream instead of just paying Akamai to do file distribution properly?). Or I could just bite the marketing problems and sell most people capped/throttled connections and then sell "pure" lines to people who want to sit on P2P all day .... oh wait, I already sell them, they're called business class lines and don't have any oversubscription problems, but are a ton more expensive.

So it seems I lose no matter what I do. Either I can sell "unlimited" connections which are nice and easy for the 95% of my customers that don't spend all their time downloading movies and video games 24/7, but I have to spend ridiculous quantities of cash on transit just to stop my service grinding to a halt. Or I can try and sell capped/throttled connections, which will kill me because nobody will understand how it's measured and my customers will just go elsewhere. Or I can sell unlimited connections and throttle BitTorrent in some way, perhaps in the fine print, which makes my 95% legit customer base happy but pisses off the 5% I don't really want anyway.

Re:EDGE

[CastrTroy]

I think it's easy for ISPs to show people how many GB they have currently used. Just have a web page they can visit that shows them how much they have used for the current billing cycle, along with a nice graph showing how much they have used each day. Also, have an application that runs in the system try that queries their system every hour, or other predefined period in time to show how much they have used. You wouldn't even need to log in, because they could identify you by your IP Address. You wouldn't have to visit the webpage, or run this application to show your current usage, but then you couldn't complain that you didn't know you were over the limit.

Re:EDGE

[IamTheRealMike]

That's a lot of complexity, given that for 95% of users you can guess how much they will use based on statistics. It's only the outliers that mess this up. I mean, sure, people could learn over time by watching graphs of their own usage, but you're still expecting non-technical people to use units that are not even metric, and don't have any obvious real world parallels ...

Re:EDGE

[tmarthal]

Its p2p because if it was centralized, then the common carriers/ISPs would start to want a cut of the profit from the central place (think Google and BellSouth which started the whole Net Neutrality debacle). With p2p delivery, the ISP has no one central business they can point at to tell them to give them money for delivering their content.

This has also been mentioned the case for BBC's iPlayer. If the BBC is going to deliver all of their content over a connection they pay for, their ISP will filter it.

p2p is the thing that is filling the pipes because its the only distribution method that is dynamic enough to get around any sorts of filters.

Re:EDGE

[GWBasic]

So it seems I lose no matter what I do. Either I can sell "unlimited" connections which are nice and easy for the 95% of my customers that don't spend all their time downloading movies and video games 24/7, but I have to spend ridiculous quantities of cash on transit just to stop my service grinding to a halt. Or I can try and sell capped/throttled connections, which will kill me because nobody will understand how it's measured and my customers will just go elsewhere. Or I can sell unlimited connections and throttle BitTorrent in some way, perhaps in the fine print, which makes my 95% legit customer base happy but pisses off the 5% I don't really want anyway.

The electric company handles this problem by selling metered service. They give you a connection that is capable of handling more amperage then you need, and charge based on the amount of energy used. Customers who use disproportionatly higher amounts of energy pay more.

It's probably time that ISPs do the same thing. They could charge $20 / month for an incredibly fast connection, but meter it so that the average person pays about $30 - $50 / month.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[UbuntuDupe]

You make a valid point, but aren't you overstating the strength of your evidence?

Not even close

[TheMeuge]

We hear from our customers directly and indirectly. It's a very competitive business, ravenously so. I think our company is very, very sensitive to customer attitude -- we have to consider this

Hearing that hurt my ear. I've been a relatively unwilling AT&T customer 3 times now, due to various mergers and acquisitions, and they've managed to go against the consensus opinions of their customers on every issue that I have encountered, where such a dichotomy existed.

For instance, I purchased my Blackjack from an authorized Cingular dealer, and received unlimited internet for $19.99 per month. I was really happy with the service. After Cingular became AT&T wireless, I began getting service outages, and now it takes me >2 minutes to connect to the internet, and the connection will time out after 2 minutes of being idle, rendering it almost useless. When I called, I was told that AT&T has different internet plans than Cingular, and my Blackjack could only get the $40/month plans, and they wouldn't help me with my service problems. I am still under contract, but it seems that AT&T isn't interested in their part of the deal.

It is perfectly clear that as a part of a government-sanctioned mono- or oligopoly, they have no interest at all in their customer's opinions.

Re:Not even close

[Lumpy]

It's your settings, reset your internet settings in the phone to default.

I did that and now I get no problems with my blackjack. I even get over 740k in metro detroit when I am in 3G land.

Also, do NOT sign a new contract with them. Stay with the old cingular terms. They will screw you hard if you change, and as long as you are a "old" customer you still fall under the old terms and you are safe from them screwing you on data plan rates.

I dont care what they promise you, do NOT upgrade your plan or change it in any way until it's really worth your while as your data price will go to the $40.00 a month.

Re:Not even close

[Jeff Minor]

You can sue them. Call someone and see about starting a class action suit.

Re:Not even close

[antdude]

What happens with those contracts that are subject to change? Those are annoying.

Re:Not even close

[DannyO152]

Call it dannyo's commentary, companies that rely on customer satisfaction to stay competitive don't have to say it.

Re:Not even close

[Nullav]

Because getting a $5 refund after a few years is really worth the trouble.

Re:Not even close

[Maxo-Texas]

+10 insightful.

Plus.. and then you'll pay $1 per year extra forever because the corporation will just pass the cost of the settlement on to you.

the only people that will make out will be the lawyers who get about 2 mil or more each.

Re:Not even close

[the_one(2)]

Don't you have consumer groups or something that can take of that crap?

Re:Not even close

[ePhil_One]

What happens with those contracts that are subject to change? Those are annoying.

I think some of the terms are subject to change, but changing material aspects of the contract, such as rates & services cannot be altered w/o some sort of compensation. So they can change the privacy policies, but they can't just start charging you $49.99 when you had been paying $39.99. This is the difference between contract agreements, like the cell phone agreements, and Month to Month services, like cable (who can raise your rates and change your service by just including a note in your bill (assuming various regulatory requiremenst are met). Contract law is generally on your side.

Re:Not even close

[Walter Carver]

Can I make a suggestion about the 2 minutes of idle time? Can you have ping on the background pinging yahoo.com or google.com (just one package, you don't need more) every 100 seconds? Or you could use wget to grab a few standard pages or random pages. Just use wget example.com, it will grab only the first HTML file (a tiny size of bandwidth but it might keep your connection alive).

Don't shed a tier for me

[Dachannien]

My suggestion - though I'm not an AT&T customer - is to investigate the possibility of implementing tiered pricing as Time Warner is considering. If the problem with BitTorrent and other P2P apps (from your perspective, anyway) is disproportionate bandwidth usage, why not just charge more from the people using more than their fair share?

That is, unless the true motivation here is that you're deep in the pocket of the content cabal and will do anything to get whatever pittance of a kickback they're willing to give.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Belial6]

They don't really want to go to tiered. If they do, they would need to stop advertising "Unlimited Internet" for their lowest price.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[zappepcs]

Although there is some sense to what you are suggesting, there is still one problem: Unlimited MEANS unlimited. If you sell users an unlimited plan, it is UNLIMITED. If you sell them that plan then decide that it is only unlimited for certain types of traffic packets, well, that is just not legal. If you buy a car, you have reasonable expectations that it will work on ALL highways. If you buy an unlimited Internet plan, you have reasonable expectations that it will work for all Internet protocol types and traffic.

If they want to sell a plan that does not permit P2P protocols, fine as long as that is what it says up front. If they want to sell a plan that only allows 10KB per month, no problem (good luck with that btw) and other such things. The trouble is that they sell unlimited plans, and their real problem is that they didn't think anyone would use the unlimited part. You know, customers get tired of trying to connect, so just don't use the service too much, then it's all good.

Now, if the reason for wanting to filter is ONLY to help the **AA and/or government types to find out things about you, well... burn the witches in hell I say. Better yet, switch services, let the shareholders burn them. I switched, as fast as I could when AT&T merged with Cingular. Do you need a daddy? AT&T wants to be your Ma Bell?

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[purpleraison]

Yes tiered pricing IS a good idea, and ultimately I will go with the company that offers what I want at the cheapest price. Sooner or later it will come back around to unlimited usage because EVERYONE will do the same thing. Filter my content, no problem -- there's other carriers who won't.

Fortunately my money speaks for me, and I will spend it where it benefits me the most. ATT knows this, and they should be concerned.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

"more than your fair share"?

The company SOLD you a plan where you would be given upload and download transfer rates of a specific speed that is (if you go by their advertising) unlimited otherwise. This means if you're using your connection to it's maximum allowed rate all the time, you're technically getting EXACTLY what you paid for. EXACTLY your fair share. THEY are the ones overselling their network. Either they stop using "unlimited" as a buzzword in their advertising campaigns, or they start setting realistic transfer speeds that their network can handle. (Both methods would lose a lot of new customers unless their competition does the same.) That's the only way to "fix" this problem properly, -unless- they upgrade their network the way they were suppose to.

Passing the blame on to people who use "more than their fair share" is ignoring the REAL issues that are caused by the telcoms themselves.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[TheAngryIntern]

the only problem i have with that is for people living with roommates. Take my situation for example: I don't do any downloading of music and movies anymore. i don't even have a p2p client installed on my machine anymore. All i use my connection for is for online gaming and downloading legal files (patches, game demos, stuff from itunes, etc...) My 2 roommates, however, are bit-torrent freaks and are always hogging the bandwidth. i can tell when they both get heavy with their downloading cuz the pings in my online games go to shit. with Time Warner's tier thing, our household would get charged more, even though not everyone is doing heavy downloading. I guess if TWC did this to our area, I would just have to make my roommates pay the extra fee.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[DeadManCoding]

Totally agreed on the unlimited plan. The only problem is that I live in California, which means either Comcast for my cable internet, or AT&T for DSL lines. And I play MMOs that require BitTorrent connections. I think I need to start looking harder for a new ISP...

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[carambola5]

Here's what they should do:

Instead of whining that a single p2p user is affecting other subscribers in a cell, implement a "minimum guaranteed bandwidth" commensurate with their actual available bandwidth. So, if you have a 1 Gbps line going to a group of 1000 customers, offer a 1 Mbps guaranteed minimum, with up to 20 (or whatever) Mbps depending on a network traffic.

See? That wasn't so hard. Now they can implement QoS such that a heavy user is the first to get bumped down to 1 Mbps when another user wants bandwidth.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[boyko.at.netqos]

Well, the problem is that charging for the data isn't going to do anything to resolve bandwidth issues. A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days. It's because data isn't the limited resource - data is unlimited. It's bandwidth - the capacity of the pipe at any particular time which is limited.

If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place. Everybody gets a share of the pipe. If you want a bigger share of that pipe, you can ALREADY pay for more bandwidth, which is the limited resource. Charging for bandwidth AND data is "double dipping"

In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Tony Hoyle]

Unlimited MEANS unlimited.

Yes but it's been reasonably well established now that they mean unlimited availability *not* unlimited data.

That's why some 'unlimited' plans have 'fair use' caps of 10GB, 5GB or less, and the ones that don't mention one have vague legalese about being able to cut you off/throttle you without warning if you 'affect the experience of other users'.

It is definately not illegal for them to filter bittorrent... it'll be in the contract you signed that they have the right to do exactly that.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now, 5% of the users is using 50% of the bandwith.
This means that almost 95% is not taking advantage from their 'unlimited' bandwith.
As soon as they start to tier their prices, the 95% of 'limited' users will be downgrading to more suitable (and cheaper) contracts.
The ISPs are risking a huge drop in total revenue if they drop the 'unlimited' product.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't advertise unlimited access. Prove me wrong.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Different AC here. :p

"the 95% of 'limited' users will be downgrading to more suitable (and cheaper) contracts."

lol. You do understand that this won't happen right? The "more suitable contracts" will be exactly what you're paying now. They'll just charge more for the ones actually using the bandwidth they're currently promised.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[TheSkyIsPurple]

It's already in evert broadband contract I've ever agreed to. (Never had DSL though)
They all say something to the effect of "no servers", which would drastically affect your p2p usage.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[mistermiyagi]

"If the problem with BitTorrent and other P2P apps (from your perspective, anyway) is disproportionate bandwidth usage, why not just charge more from the people using more than their fair share?"

            The word Disproportionate should only apply to situations where you are expected to use an alloted amount. "unlimited" data plans imply by their name that you are paying for the right to use all you want.

  Also don't forget that if their advertising is saying Unlimited and your contract says unlimited then Unlimited is consider to be my fair share. In the US companies are ( usually ) held to what they advertise. Unless AT&T and the other providers are going to change advertisement to reflect the removal of "unlimited" service ( and the subsequent loss of customers ) They should be forced to increase bandwith supply to meet the demand placed on that bandwith through the sales of "unlimited" service. If they can't meet their end of the contract they shouldn't be allowed to now; after overselling service, say that they have to limit certain types of traffic to prevent their network from collapsing. Either that or they should refund money for our loss of the contractually obligated unlimited access service we signed up for.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Dachannien]

I switched, as fast as I could when AT&T merged with Cingular. Hehe, I dodged a bullet on my cell phone service with that one as well. I was with Cingular, decided they sucked hairy goat balls, and tried switching to AT&T. Of course, AT&T screwed up my order (LNP had just become available here, and they weren't ready for it), so I ended up cancelling and going with Sprint. A couple months later came the headlines that Cingular and AT&T were merging.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Jurily]

There is no such thing as "disproportionate bandwidth usage" in an unlimited plan. They sold it, but they don't want to deliver it.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Dun Malg]

They don't advertise unlimited access. Prove me wrong. Fucking tard. 30 seconds with google reveals:

http://www.consumer.att.com/plans/internet/

Get unlimited high-speed Internet access over your existing phone line at great low rates. ... Plans as low as $19.95 per month

So fucking stupid, it's no wonder you post as AC.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[networkBoy]

I live in California and have SureWest DSL.
I'm at the boundry of their service area and as a result only get 1Mbps, but! That 1Mbps is *faster* in aggregate than I had under AT&T with 3-6 meg! Without fail.
-nB

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[pcmanjon]

"If you sell users an unlimited plan, it is UNLIMITED. If you sell them that plan then decide that it is only unlimited for certain types of traffic packets, well, that is just not legal."

TOTALLY UNTRUE!

AT&T has an Unlimited MediaNET plan for my PDA Phone. It included unlimited internet access. I started streaming data and other things to my Windows mobile phone -- and they gave me a $82,000 bill. I eventually got out of it, but they tried to charge me per KB after the first 5 gigabytes of usage.

Tell me where it's illegal and people like me and others will have a court case.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[petermgreen]

A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days
There are a couple of issues with this:

The first is that very few people download hundreds of megabytes per day from non P2P sources. Even if they do (for example a video on demand TV series) the content provider is likely to take steps to place the content close to the users (because it reduces thier costs as well as the users ISPs costs, see for example the BBC who peer with most if not all major UK ISPs) whereas with P2P bits of the files tend to come from all over the world.

The other issue is assuming a network that treats all packets equally a group of TCP connections competing for the line should end up with about equal bandwidth. So if you use a protocol that uses n TCP connections (I think bittorrent tends to use about 5 though it depends on configuration) at once to download a file you will end up with 5 times the bandwidth share as someone who is downloading using a conventional protocol that is based on a single TCP connection.

If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place.
One soloution is certainly a QOS system that limits bandwidth hogs to thier fair share while allowing normal users to have a normal bursty pattern. I think the main downside to that system is you really need to implement it at every level of the network as you can't be sure at what level of the network the pinch point will be.

In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist.
With voip I agree with you but that isn't what this article is about. I would also agree with you if they tried to attack sanely implemented legitimate digital distribution of TV series but that isn't what this article is about either.

Distribution using tools like bittorrent is a network admins nightmare. There is little to no attempt made to keep traffic on cheap local links rather than expensive international ones. Multiple TCP connections are used for a single download making the protocol more agressive in it's use of bandwidth (see above) and the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[boyko.at.netqos]

Good points all, and you've really got me thinking about that last one: "the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal." I gotta meditate on that.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Billly Gates]

But do they use At&T as their backbone?

This the problem with monopolies and I would not be surprised if they do and end up charging more and throttling down traffic for any DSL service but their own. Also do I have to wait 2 or 3 months for AT&T to install it?

Sorry if I seem skeptical but I am no fan of the major tele cos.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a server. I'm a peer.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[TheSkyIsPurple]

You are offering up data for others to request and consume... you are a server as well as a client, which makes you a peer.
(unless you're a pure leach)

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Get unlimited high-speed Internet access ...

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[ssstraub]

Did you frame that bill and hang it on your wall or at least get a picture of it?

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[billcopc]

That's precisely why we're stuck with these ridiculous contracts and horrible broadband speeds. Anything more and you'll see a lot more people switching over to IPTV. It's already happening with VOIP on a massive scale.

Me, I lived sans-cable-TV before moving in with the lady. I still don't watch anything but late-night garbage to put me to sleep. I can get all I care about from DVDs and the internet.

Now if these telecoms could get beaten over the head with a billion cluesticks, maybe they could specialize into die-hard internet providers. FUCK TV, FUCK PHONES, give me one monster IP pipe and run everything through that. Go ahead and sell me a VOIP handset, an IPTV set-top box, an iTunes-style music, movie and tv-show store... I'll gladly give my money to the telecoms if only they would grow and adapt to today's digital lifestyle. I have ZERO interest in funding the past. It's a pretty fucking sad state of affairs when France is ahead of us on the technology curve - France for fuck sakes!

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[BestNicksRTaken]

no they don't need to go tiered, they need to stop overselling.

frankly if you say unlimited internet then it should be just that - and not filtered.

if they weren't betting the profit margins on joe public only using 5% of his bandwidth, then they wouldn't have to worry about the people who use bittorrent 24/7.

they really should just adjust their pricing structures based on today's usage (they have the information they need in their logs) and not still be basing their usage plans on 1992's traffic.

you've got to love the isp's who market their services with slogans such as "faster music downloading" and then stop you dong it!

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[boyko.at.netqos]

I agree with everything except the French-bashing. The French are actually known for trying out new technologies. The Concorde? The Bullet-Train? The Eiffel Tower? The Metric System? The Guillotine?

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[u-235-sentinel]

Although there is some sense to what you are suggesting, there is still one problem: Unlimited MEANS unlimited. If you sell users an unlimited plan, it is UNLIMITED. If you sell them that plan then decide that it is only unlimited for certain types of traffic packets, well, that is just not legal. If you buy a car, you have reasonable expectations that it will work on ALL highways. If you buy an unlimited Internet plan, you have reasonable expectations that it will work for all Internet protocol types and traffic.

Unlimited means limited if you are a Concast customer.

Most of my neighborhood signed up years ago when they were advertising "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". Then a few of us were booted last year for using the Internet too much.

Quite lame but that's the truth. Many of us have been told we must have been doing something wrong like running a server or downloading illegal content. Guess what. That's not what we were accused of. And yes, there are many services which use IPTV, Internet radio and P2P legally. I tell them to get over it.

We've been blogging about it for nearly a year now. Nearly 75,000 hits! It's important to people. Either it's Unlimited or it's not. And if not, then companies need to grow a spine and disclose what people REALLY paid for. Otherwise it's false advertising (translation... they lied).

BTW, Concast is spamming our mail box for my family to resubscribe with them. We were terminated and told after 12 months we could resubscribe. Think we will? ;-)

Here is our answer to Concast via a video we created. Enjoy :D

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[networkBoy]

yes and no.
Surewest is their own TelCo, so no waiting on AT&T for anything. They have a peering point to AT&Ts OC ring, but I doubt AT&T is going to filter that...

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[IdeaMan]

Use Freenet. They don't (can't) know what their caching (plausible deniability), it's Free (as in speech), and a node can be situated close each cluster of users. If someone were to create an ad-blocking proxy site on Freenet browsing the web would become 3x faster.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[CmdrRickHunter]

That "double dipping" is common practice. And anyways, _IF_ they dropped the cost of bandwidth to cover the media and instituted bandwidth fees, then it'd not actually be double dipping. You'd pay for the physical connection to your ISP, then pay for your portion of the shared bandwidth.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[lhorn]

Dear Sir, Madam or Neuter AC. More people will respond to your arguments if you
do not needlessly repeat yourself.

If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[Nom du Keyboard]

they aren't moving anywhere until they discuss this with their customers.

If this is true, then it isn't going to happen. What customer is going to say, "Hey, block some of the applications I could otherwise use with this broadband pipe I pay for."

Even if a customer isn't using it at the moment, they won't be in favor of blocking it since they might want it in the future.

If this is true, then it will never happen at AT&T, and they were just blowing smoke to appease everyone since they know their filtering solution is impossible anyway. You can't filter what you can't read, and you can't read strongly encrypted packets - end of discussion.

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[fahrbot-bot]

Even if a customer isn't using it at the moment, they won't be in favor of blocking it since they might want it in the future.

You're manking the assumption that customers are not stupid and short-sighted. AT&T will promise them a 50% discount for 3 months and they'll sign anything.

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[n6kuy]

Obviously you misunderstood what they mean by "discuss this with their customers".

Discuss, as in, "Oh, by the way, we're changing the terms of your service."

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[megaditto]

Why would that be short-sighted?

I for one do not use p2p filesharing, ever. Even a one month discount in return for throttling gnutella and such to say 56 kbps would be fine with me.

Very likely most home users fall into the same category as me regarding filesharing (i.e. doing some web, news, VoIP, family videos on youtube, some shopping, and church newsletters).

Note that the 1% of users that know about filesharing are probably the ones using up 50% of the total bandwidth. I don't mind my ISP dropping those in exchange for a 10% service discount for the rest.

(And if are one of those people that need to share 160GB worth of files a month, you should probably paying for a dedicated line anyways).

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[edmicman]

But it doesn't just apply to "illegal" filesharing. More and more downloads are going to be handled via P2P protocols because of the bandwidth crunch that the ISPs have created for themselves. How many HD movie downloads via iTunes would it take to hit 160GB in a month? What about legal downloads of isos or movies via bittorrent? What about Joost streaming TV (or any streaming video technology) that makes use of P2P technologies?

Capping bandwidths and throttling users is very shortsighted - it's only going to put off the inevitable. The truth is that the ISPs have always oversold their bandwidth, and are now getting burned for it. The answer isn't to limit people's use - the solution is to build more bandwidth infrastructure!

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[Usquebaugh]

Firstly, they went for the mentally ill, I wasn't mentally ill so I remained silent

Secondly, they went for the homosexuals, I wasn't homo sexual so I remained silent

Thirdly, they went for the jews, I wasn't jewish so I remained silent

Lastly, they came for me and nobody spoke in my defense

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[afidel]

Hope you never takeup WoW, patches are distributed through bittorrent =) 500MB patches at modem speed would really suck!

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption, properly implemented and validated, is difficult to get around, but it is almost trival to trick most users into an insecure setup. How many people validate that the certificate seen on their browser matches the website?

Bluecoat systems makes SSL proxies to allow governments and companies with enough money to create certificates on the fly that appear very similar to the original website cert. For example, if you are at www.foo.com, they can create a cert with www.foo.example.com and have their own ca.example.com CA pre-installed in your corporate browser. The SSL would appear to work perfectly. Would your mother know any better? Do you? and do you verify certs **every** time?

I don't.

I used to work at a company that did this. The also implemented something called "deep packet inspection" for the data that the bluecoats kicked out. Millions of dollars of networking and millions in EMC storage were involved.

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[jeffstar]

How do you differentiate legal or illegal P2P traffic and a Skype call? At the end of the day, you can't.

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[UnderCoverPenguin]

You can't filter what you can't read

Yes, you can. Just route anything unreadable to /dev/null

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[EdIII]

"You can't filter what you can't read, and you can't read strongly encrypted packets - end of discussion"

I'm sorry, but you are very incorrect. You need to Google some of this and educate yourself please. Seriously, please. The more you know, and everybody else knows, the better off we all are.

Encryption provides Privacy. That's it. When applied to communications it does not, intrinsically, provide Anonymity. Nor does it alone provide the ultimate counterattack to content filtering. I use P2P as an example as the encryption checkbox in Bittorrent is not the final "fuck the man" button.

To give you two examples:

1) If you were to write a secret code on a piece of paper and pass it to a friend by asking me to do it... Then I KNOW that you and your friend communicated. It's private, but not anonymous.

2) If you wrote something on a piece of paper, in plaintext, and placed into a jar along with 50 other pieces of paper, then your communication would be Anonymous, but not Private.

One does not imply the other. If you want both, then you need to implement specific types of systems designed to do that. You can research TOR and Freenet nodes and read the white papers on them. It can do a much better job of explaining it than I could do in this post.

So if encryption is not the easy answer, what is the complete answer to an effective counterattack on content filtering? Here is my take on it; others can feel free to chime in:

Content filtering is a very specific situation, and by specific, I mean it greatly depends on what type of communications you are sending. The Internet, which works on TCP/IP (v4 at the moment, but v6 usage is increasing), allows many different types of traffic. The first thing you need to understand, is that in most communications there are headers (the writing on the outside of the envelope), and the information being transmitted (the papers inside the envelope). There are few methods for the ISPs to attempt to manage their users by looking at both of these.

1) Determine the source and destination of the transmission.

2) Determine the nature of the data by first determining the nature of the transmission. It is FTP? Email? Kazaa? IM? Bittorrent?

3) Determine the nature of the data directly by inspection of the payloads. Compare its signatures against a list of protected IP.

4) Determine the nature of the data indirectly by inspection of its signatures and attributes provided publicly. Note, I said publicly and not privately.

Before talking about 1-4, we have to first understand that there is a difference between public and private communication. Private communication occurs between 2 parties that already know each other.All private connection types which encrypt payloads, or better yet, wrap the entire packet in an encrypted tunnel (VPN), are immune to any type of filtering (they could still be stopped, but it's all or nothing type of a deal). Don't get me started on the vulnerabilities of SSL, VPN, etc. and MITM attacks, since that would take content filtering to a whole new level. So if you are going to consider content filtering, first figure out if your communication is truly a public one or a private one. Additionally, if you are using DNS to obtain the location of the destination (which that is pretty much a foregone conclusion), those communications are never anonymous, and hardly ever private. I have yet to meet the SSL encrypted DNS server. TOR nodes even have a problem in that DNS queries "leak" around it. So unless you figure out how to get your UDP packets to a foreign DNS server anonymously (not impossible), your ISP will notice you "finding" ThePirateBay.org.

The first method does not apply to content filtering, but blocking of known offenders and networks. This would be like all of China blocking addresses of any system in the US. Just creates 2 network

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[wkk2]

I'm not sure encryption will help. The service providers can block services by port, block by traffic pattern, and probably memory dump your session key. Open phone software might help if the encryption was moved to a smart card. Does anyone know where I can get a mini sc smart card with Symbian OS VPN support?

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[Nom du Keyboard]

I hope you see the overall point of this post is that encryption does not provide a quick and easy solution and that content filtering is more complex then that.

I am not going to reply with nearly as many words as you've used to educate us in general about passing messages on the Internet. Instead, just consider:

In order to filter and prevent the transfer of unauthorized copyrighted content across the internet, you need to be able to identify that exact content. Because audio and video data comes in different formats, compression ratios, even different amplitudes created by different codecs, an overall audio or video "fingerprint" must be created and compared to a database of copyrighted fingerprints. You can't do this unless you can see the exact data, and you can't see the exact data if it is encrypted beyond your ability to decode. If you intend to simply block all "suspicious" content, or take the approach that if I Can't Read It I'll Simply Block It, all hell is going to rain down upon you.

In summary, you can't know what to block unless you can read it during transmission, and you can't read it during transmission if it's strongly encrypted. Hence attempts to provide effective internet filtering of copyrighted material will be ineffective against trivial-to-implement strong encryption, and is doomed to fail. QED.

Anonymity was never part of this filtering equation.

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[EdIII]

"Anonymity was never part of this filtering equation"

It is part of the equation. The overall, big picture if you will.

You asked me to consider:

"In order to filter and prevent the transfer of unauthorized copyrighted content across the internet, you need to be able to identify that exact content. Because audio and video data comes in different formats, compression ratios, even different amplitudes created by different codecs, an overall audio or video "fingerprint" must be created and compared to a database of copyrighted fingerprints."

I gave it a pretty thorough consideration. You are looking at this from the method in which you exactly identify that content, the third method I identified. I greatly oversimplified its complexity, and deliberately failed to examine on a technical basis. I agree that is gargantuan task, fraught with complexity. I further agree that anonymity in that specific method does not apply, while privacy achieved through encryption does apply. I stated that encryption did apply, and that when applied it was indeed "doomed to fail". QED.

Anonymity applies in the overall analysis of content filtering at 2 primary levels:

1) Identifying the individual transmitting the data, whether or not the data is private.
2) Identifying the type of communication, whether or not the data is private.

I make the following analogy:

An Arab Muslim walks through an airport. He is wearing thick, opaque robes from neck to foot. Underneath the robes, where nobody can see it, are dozens of stick of dynamite arranged into a bomb.

TSA, by simple inspection, cannot determine if contraband is present. The robes provide privacy (encryption). However, the fact that he is Arab, and Muslim, IMPLIES that he could be carrying contraband (communication identified as P2P). His behavior is suspicious (TCP/IP session activity looks like P2P, file sharing, ftp, etc.). He is actually wearing a sign that says, "God is Great, Death to the Zionist Crusaders" (advertised data signatures). While in the airport, he makes a PUBLIC phone call and loudly argues with Osama Bin Laden (Communicates with Bittorrent Tracker).

This is why "trivial-to-implement" strong encryption on it's own will not be effective to stop content filtering. Anonymity must apply here, since it masks other attributes of the transmissions that can be filtered. It is NOT JUST the data signatures that could be used in content filter logic. There are many other attributes and behaviors that can be looked at and weighted.

Encryption just is NOT the one-size-fits-all solution. Especially, when considering the specific type of communications that are P2P. You are only looking at the third method, while not addressing the others.

Furthermore, how do you account for filtering of websites and their content? That is by it's very nature public. Whether or not that type of filtering can be automated, given the aforementioned complexity is up for debate. However, encryption, once again does not help here. Other solutions must be examined, possibly munging projects like Monolith.

So once again, "You can't filter, what you can't read" is an oversimplification created through an incomplete understanding of anonymity, encryption, and communications.

P.S - I don't mean to offend anyone by the airport analogy. I think my whole point is that filtering using most of those attributes is offensive and presumptive, just as stereotypes are.

Does filtering really work?

[dattaway]

Many people on the dd-wrt forums would love to know how to do it. Its been tried on the L7 layer, but clients get around that in seconds.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I suspect they must think its possible. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to divulge their methodology. They might consider it a key competitive advantage> Plus, divulging it would give those who would seek to avoid the filter some ideas on how to avoid it.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[Artefacto]

I'm not sure how they do it, but my ISP (netcabo, Portugal) is able to throttle bittorrent traffic even when the most strict encryption options are selected. They must be using good techniques to recognise bittorrent traffic in particular, because they're not able to throttle the encrypted protocols used by eMule. The method is so agressive that when it's in "throttle mode" other protocols may also be affected. It's also not mere passive throttling, they actually send false RST packages to your peers, so you can't keep a connection for long (talk about man-in-the-middle attacks...) And they don't acknowledge any of this ("p2p traffic speed is influenced by many factors" is the usual line) unless you get very deep in the support chain. There's no official position on this matter whatsoever.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[Tony Hoyle]

Have you considered that your ISP isn't throttling?

Bittorrent's normal behaviour is to switch between clients.. many of them are on slow connections that dropout constantly anyway. It's also generally slow, because trackers measure upload/download and only allocate the faster links to those with a good upload - which penalises DSL users over other users for example.

If you want to see the effect of this try it on a decent leased line.. you'll see the speed start off really slow..1k/sec then slowly build until you're at about 10% of the download and your upload starts to exceed double your download, then up to about 60k/sec, then by about 50% of the download (by then the ratio is about 30:1) you're at max. bandwidth - about 1MB/sec in my case.

Of course it means it's always better to FTP - by the end on the leased line I've typically send about 200* the amount of data I've received, which goes on the bandwidth bill and of course clogs up the network. On FTP it's 1*, by definition.

OTOH on the DSL line at home I see *exactly* what you're describing.. bittorrent bumps along at 1k/sec until the tracker dumps you entirely. My ISP definately isn't throttling in any way (I can talk to the MD on IRC any time he's around and he definately wouldn't lie about a thing like that).

Re:Does filtering really work?

[realmolo]

Oh, it works. A WRT54G with DD-WRT probably can't handle it, but if you buy a Packeteer or even a Fortigate unit, they can definitely identify P2P traffic and block it.

However...

If the packets are encrypted, then all bets are off. There's no way to inspect encrypted packets. At least, not easily. The only way I can imagine it could be done is to have the "filtering device" actually have special versions various P2P clients installed, and then continuously make connections, and then BLOCK the connections that it makes. Obviously, that's a really messy proposition.

Basically, if AT&T starts blocking stuff, then all of those programs will simply start *requiring* clients to use encryption. And then AT&T is back where it started.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[Artefacto]

I'm pretty sure it is throttling.

1) The global upload speed has high variability and, for long periods, averages way below my upload bandwidth.
2) There's a strong correlation between average download speed and upload speed (more than was ti be expected)
3) It started a couple of weeks after the limit of 30GB/month was removed.
4) The behavior (severity of throttling) changes from time to time -- see http://web.ist.utl.pt/~ist155741/temp/04.PNG And no, I had no other bandwidth-hungry applications running. This happens all the time. Other protocols (e.g. HTTP) work fine and do not exhibit any of these patterns.

Some people claim to have captured traffic between two ends and found extra RST packages, but, of course, I can't confirm that.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[espressojim]

Comcast is doing this in the states with sandvine. It sounds like your ISP may have the exact same equipment installed.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[dattaway]

Yes, the L7 filtering of the dd-wrt does work but only for a minute. But once that is enabled, the clients quickly hop into port 443 and back to 7881. So I block 7881 and then they roll to 7880 using encryption. Blocking 443 seems to stop it also, as they have accounts they can't get into and start another transfer. I filter, because home VoIP and P2P don't play together well and I like having family over.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[tylernt]

So... why not use QoS to prioritize packets based on IP or MAC addresses? Simply count the number of bytes sent/received by each, and the IPs/MACs with the biggest counts go to the bottom of the list. Then you don't care what port or protocol they're using, the light users are (almost*) unaffected by heavy users. I believe iptables already lets you count the number of packets (if not bytes) processed by a rule, so all you need is a bash script in a cron job.

* Obviously throttling incoming traffic is a little trickier, and you'll have to drop a lot of the bandwidth hog's incoming packets on the floor before the other side backs off and allows your light user's peer to start sending more data, but the problem is not insurmountable.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[IdeaMan]

Just sorting them isn't enough. Cable modems have these rather large outgoing buffers, and when they fill up your latency goes upwards of 400ms. You also need rate filtering on outgoing bandwidth to keep this problem in check.

AT&T have been doing bandwidth filtering for y

[Anonymous Coward]

...with their service which makes it almost impossible to download anything large anyway!!!!

Already a dozen comments...

[daveschroeder]

...in a story where an AT&T executive is asserting it "listens" to its customers, and no wisecracks about NSA wiretapping?

Come on, people, you disappoint me! ;-)

Re:Already a dozen comments...

[Anonymous Coward]

they did comment but AT&T mysteriously lost the packets

Re:Already a dozen comments...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's there to be disappointed about? There are customers at all three ends of the wire. I'm sure they listen to all of them.

Re:Already a dozen comments...

[rhizome]

...in a story where an AT&T executive is asserting it "listens" to its customers, and no wisecracks about NSA wiretapping?

This is because the interview is predicated on not listening. The "interviewer" on Slyck's side did not ask any of the obvious followup questions that would have addressed most of the highly-rated comments here. It wasn't an interview, it was a "give us your spin" questionnaire.

No fuckin way!

[superash]

If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for.

WHAT?? Was it written in the ISP subscription forms that you are not supposed to use p2p? And if I use p2p network and the whole cell is affected then its fuckin time you upgraded the b/w of the cell!!!

It's like saying, "You are using a Microwave and a fridge, your neighbor cannot switch on the lights....so, you need to switch off your fridge". pah!

Re:No fuckin way!

[rhizome]

> It has the effect of not providing the service paid for.

WHAT?? Was it written in the ISP subscription forms that you are not supposed to use p2p?

Not only that, but it'll be news to a lot of people that their residential connection has an SLA.

Re:No fuckin way!

[TheSkyIsPurple]

In most of the cases, yes.

There is usually a clause disallowing you from running a "server", and that's half of what peer to peer is.

Identifying Pirated Content

[zifn4b]

"We've [internally] tested several systems, and we're going to see if there's a way to identify pirated content on the network. That asks the question of what to do if we develop such as technology. The actual deployment raises a lot of questions, [such as the impact on] customer rights and government policy. We wouldn't proceed without answers to those questions." Hmm... maybe they could use something similar to this.

And the Singularity is just around the corner

[Ralph Spoilsport]

So, when it happens, all our troubles with bandwidth will be forgotten...

Or, will all this data processing power be squandered on downloading videos of the shaved pudendum of one Britney Spears?

RS

Competition?

[webmaster404]

It's a very competitive business

Oh I am sure there is loads of competition in the ISP business dominated by 4 businesses, that must be a ton of competition with Verizon, Time-Warner and Comcast all charging sky high rates for ISP service. Really, there's almost no competition in the ISP field there's the big 4 and some local ISPs and that is about it. Thats about the same as MS saying that the OS business is very competitive with only 1 major universal competitor which is Linux (Yes there is OS-X but it doesn't run on standard computers)

Re:Competition?

[rhizome]

that must be a ton of competition with Verizon, Time-Warner and Comcast all charging sky high rates for ISP service.

This is what has been termed The Big Lie, which if you sidestep the Godwinian implications allows AT&T to assert its barely bearable level of competition like Microsoft does with its own form of stiff competition. What they're competing against is "lack of complete domination," which is retarded in the broadest sense and an impossible Utopia in the specific.

Re:Competition?

[Yetihehe]

So tell me, why there are no more ISP? Maybe it's hard to compete with those prices? What stops you from making your own ISP and starting to provide internet for your customers? I think they would be really happy to at last get those $20/mo 100mbit pipes.

Re:Competition?

[Yetihehe]

If anyone wonders if I'm trolling, I would really know what stops people from making own ISP. If it's too costly, then why do you think they have too high prices?

Re:Competition?

[Alpha830RulZ]

What is currently inhibiting competition is the last mile problem. To give high bandwidth service, you have to have a high bandwidth connection to the premise. Currently the options for that connection are:

1) DSL over phone lines, which are monopoly owned by the phone company

2) Cable internet, which require the cable conneciton, which are monopoly owned by the cable companies

3) FiOS, which is monopoly owned by the phone companies

Any competitor has to provide new infrastructure to a very large number of consumers in order to become viable. During the time that they are laying out this infrastructure, they would be vulnerable to predatory pricing from the incumbent providers. It's pretty much a non starter unless you have literally 10's of billions of dollars lying around, which means a large corporation, eg., the phone companies.

The days of free competition in the connection space are numbered. It'll only be oligopolistic competition from here on out. Look into Verizon's approach to the Washington state market, where they are slowing FiOS rollout until they get their legislative way, for an example of how consumer friendly this will be in the future.

Re:Competition?

[Dragonslicer]

What stops you from making your own ISP and starting to provide internet for your customers? In short, the lack of copper wires not owned by the telephone or cable company to everyone's homes.

Re:Competition?

[pavera]

The answer is phone services have a huge barrier to entry. You need somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 billion dollars to provide service (IE infrastructure, fiber, routers, etc) to all the homes in a single medium sized state. Multiply that by 50, and you need 250-500 billion dollars in capital to do the whole country.

Then, you have to convince/bribe/cajoul the politicians in each state/city to give you rights of way so you can lay your fiber. This is going to cost another 5-10 billion dollars country wide. Then you have to spend another 50-100 billion in marketing to steal customers away from the incumbents. Now, maybe, if you're lucky and your marketing worked, and the incubents didn't drop their prices by 50%, you have a revenue stream.

Once you have the infrastructure in place, adding MB of bandwidth is relatively cheap. This is why everyone hates the phone/cable companies, because they have no competition, but they could be providing much better services for the same we are paying now, but they dont' have to because there is not competition. If someone could magically lay a fiber network for cheap, they could destroy the incumbents. But the incumbents know this as well, and if someone did try to compete, they could just as easily drop their prices and keep customers from switching, causing the new provider to fail. They would then buy up the new providers assets at a bankruptcy fire sale, and then raise prices back up and not use the new assets to provide more services.

Re:Competition?

[Corwn of Amber]

Wtf? OFX runs *better* than Linux, on all 64 bits x86s.

Re:Competition?

[webmaster404]

I wasn't saying anything about OSX's quality. I was merely stating that I can't go put OSX on my normal PC and expect it to work right, while I can put Linux/Windows on there and it will work. I was referring too how there are very very few OSes that have significant marketshare that will run on existing hardware.

Re:Competition?

[webmaster404]

First infrastructure. The cables are expensive, not to mention the hours it would take just to get a neighborhood linked to it. Secondly, deals with different housing units, apartments or dorms are sometimes one cable/phone/internet provider only making it nearly impossible to run your ISP to them. Thirdly bandwidth its cheap to add when you have the infrastructure down but until then, its quite expensive. If your an established company that got grants from the government to help add your phone service, its not too hard to add dial-up to them, and later DSL. From there you have the money to add high-speed internet. But for a new ISP to add them, it would be more cable and wire and besides the physical cost, the rights to the property would be hard to get approval. Why is it so expensive? Its a basic monopoly, its hard to get AT&T service where there is comcast, comcast where there is time-warner, and the local ISP where there is time-warner. Take out competition and everything becomes more expensive, just look at the OS market for an example.

Re:Competition?

[Corwn of Amber]

I had understood you. I was typing that (and am typing this) on a fairly normal x86, where I've installed Leopard in under 30 minutes. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was the Ethernet card, and there's a -relatively easy to find- driver.

My point is, you actually can install OSX on a normal PC and expect it to work. How's that for a desktop Unix that already has all the Necessary Apps (i.e. MS Office including Outlook, even if it's called Entourage, and the full Adobe Suite.)

I'm amazed that Steve Jobs doesn't sell OSX boxed for grey PCs -clearly printed on the box that it's not guaranteed to work. He'd cut off Microsoft's air supply in a year, dwarfing Linux's adoption rate by a ridiculous margin in the process. Maybe he can't wrap his head around Apple having to either write an Office suite themselves, or maybe calling Corel back from the dead...

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[UbuntuDupe]

Ah, okay. Earlier you were drawing some pretty wildly over-reaching inferences, but I think now, with those caveats you mentioned, I'd have to agree.

I'd watch out on sending copyrighted material like that though. With all this monitoring going on, even a short excerpt like that could get you in trouble. Good move encrypting.

All Depends on How They Ask

[TechForensics]

You've never seen poll questions, have you? It all depends on how the question is phrased:

1) Should we (AT&T) slow down some kinds of uses you can make of your unlimited pipe; or

2) Should we throttle the bandwidth hogs who decrease the bandwidth available to YOU.

That's what leading questions are all about...

lying

[mozkill]

you can believe what this guy is saying in the interview. they dont actually consider "what the customer thinks" . the only thing that really matters is how they can get enough leverage to raise fees. they will figure out how to do it eventually and bit torrent users will lose out. its only a matter of time. one thing is for sure, you cant expect the AT&T spokesman to come out and say the truth, which is that " profits matter more than the customers".

Re:lying

[LaughingCoder]

profits matter more than the customers

Except that AT&T also knows that without customers there can be no profit. So in that case, customers are all that matters. Hmmm, what we have here is a genuine conundrum. Maybe it's not quite as simplistic as you suggest. Maybe they really are considering their customers - even if it's for all the "wrong" reasons like making a profit and staying in business, rather than just "doing the right thing".

Re:lying

[mozkill]

what really matters is profits, and given that fact, all they care about is marketing and how to get leverage against their customers to charge them more. this is far more important to the bottom line than the happiness of the customers. in the short run, customer happiness does not matter. if you think that AT&T is forgoing the short term importance of stockholder profits, and instead focusing on long term customer happiness, which does not guarantee more profit given a very competitive market, then you are living in a dream world.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[Scutter]

WARNING - - - Cat-like typing detected.

I had AT&T's service

[Jewfro_Macabbi]

Now I've dropped them like a bad habit. Seriously - their service sucks. Those commercials you see advertising their "broadband" network where the guys in a pond with a laptop surfing at high speeds. Yeah - my ass. I'm happy with my new Alltel service. Now I can download at the speeds faster than AT&T's total connection... The first month I used AT&T's mobile broadband - I received a $5000 dollar bill. I called them - WTF? They explained that though they had added unlimited net access to my account - they'd forgotten to take of the per MB charge - but they will fix it. The next month - a $15000 dollar bill - and the same rigamarole. Next month - a $34,000 dollar bill. At this point they disconnected my service for non-payment. I'll admit that lasted all of thirty seconds after calling them. It took 5 months for them to correct my bill.

Re:I had AT&T's service

[RealGrouchy]

The first month I used AT&T's mobile broadband - I received a $5000 dollar bill. I'm lucky, I was able to get a service plan that specifies unmarked fives and tens.

- RG>

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Ah, okay. Earlier you were drawing some pretty wildly over-reaching inferences, but I think now, with those caveats you mentioned, I'd have to agree.

I'd watch out on sending copyrighted material like that though. With all this monitoring going on, even a short excerpt like that could get you in trouble. Good move encrypting. I just wanted to apologize for letting my cat walk over the keyboard. He's an Apple fan, you know, and he just won't let some tropics just drop.

Actually...

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

I posted one, but my ISP filtered the post.

Doublespeak and lies

[SirLurksAlot]

"We've [internally] tested several systems, and we're going to see if there's a way to identify pirated content on the network. That asks the question of what to do if we develop such as technology. The actual deployment raises a lot of questions, [such as the impact on] customer rights and government policy. We wouldn't proceed without answers to those questions."

Yes, because they were so concerned with privacy when they let the government monitor communications across their network without court authorization. The position they're coming from is that they see that Comcast may be in hot water with the way they've handled their network, and they also see the possibility of the hammer coming down on them if the telcos aren't granted immunity for allowing the government free access to all of their network traffic.

No one's running out there and all of a sudden identifying such traffic. We're not going to do that. We are partnering to identify.

What kind of doublespeak PR crap is this? Either you are trying to identify content, or you're not.

Re:Doublespeak and lies

[Anonymous Coward]

It means some idiot thought they would be safe from lawsuits if they subcontract the work to a third party. IANAL, but I think a good lawyer would take that case apart. If the filtering work is paid for by them, and benefits their bottom line, they are as responsible as if the work is done by an internal department.

While Joey the Packet may have been shot by Frankie Two Filters your honour, we will show that Frankie pulled the trigger on orders from GodMa the Bell.

We listen to our customers...

[Damocles the Elder]

..the same way we did opinion polls and studies to show us that our customers wanted to be wiretapped! Honestly. Everyone was emailing us, phoning us, saying that they wanted to be monitored. And who are we to deny our customers?

I hope this happens

[AlgorithMan]

The day that P2P Traffic gets filtered will be the day when anonymous P2P will finally catch on...
then - when everyone can download everything without any fear of being caught - the CD sales will finally become THAT bad, that the music industry MUST start thinking about making better offers OR die... anyhow the result will be that all these crazy lawsuit-waves and the evil legislation lobbying will FINALLY come to an end

Re:I hope this happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, yeah right. It's trivial to identify P2P by the bandwith consumption and network traffic pattern, you know.

Re:I hope this happens

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean offer high quality MP3s without DRM for under a dollar a track?
They do that now, after years of whining by p2p advocates. What are you pretending to demand this time?

Re:I hope this happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes and no. Stronger anonymity means worse latency, more routing problems, and weird hard-to-track down bugs. Even networks like Tor, which are not particularly anonymous (opennet means nodes can trivially be identified / blocked, logging "cancer" nodes can easily compromise network etc) for the sake of improved performance and ease-of-use, are generally considered slow and not widely used.

Designing p2p with strong anonymity is very hard ... even a fully encrypted darknet with unpredictable packet sizes and no constant session bytes like freenet can, the devs admit, probably be identified by flow analysis hardware in its current state. A steganography arms race to disguise your protocol as VoIP / game traffic etc is the only obvious answer, which will of course hurt performance even more ...

Sensitive Indeed

[EEBaum]

I think our company is very, very sensitive to customer attitude

Would be nice if that sensitivity would trickle down to the customer service phone reps, one of which answered "yes" when I asked "so it's company policy to charge customers for services they don't receive?"

Interview is complete BS

[whoever57]

Parent is entirely correct. If AT&T were really concerned about bandwidth hogs, then imposing traffic limits is the way to go (and stop lying to their customers about the "unlimited" nature of their Internet service.

I suspect that AT&T thinks that they won't be sued for deliberately violating their "unlimited" contract by people who are swapping files in violation of copyright. But what about people who are using P2P for entirely legal purposes? One of those could sue AT&T if AT&T decided to limit his/her "unlimited" Internet accedd.

Ob: cynicism

[Guppy06]

"We hear from our customers directly and indirectly... I think our company is very, very sensitive to customer attitude -- we have to consider this," Jim Cicconi told Slyck.com"

They hear from their customers by tapping their phone lines without a warrant. What better way to stay in tune with customer attitudes by recording them directly and without their knowledge?

I LOL'd

[stinerman]

It's a very competitive business, ravenously so

Yeah, 2.5 options make for a very competitive market. You (or other monopoly) own my phone lines, while my cable monopoly owns my cable lines. High-latency satellite connections, slow-ass dialup (still over the monopoly's lines, BTW), or "unlimited" (5GB cap) cell data plans are the rest of the .5 options.

I think a lot of businesses would be quite happy to have such an absence of competition in their markets.

metered usage is the long term solution

[wakim1618]

There are several advantages to treating bankwidth like any other utility. Yes, your monthly charges will vary. So does your electricity bill and gas bill. But at the same time, this will provide pressure from consumers for software companies to declare how often their software calls home and how much bandwidth their application uses. In turn, this provides impetus for Congress to pass legislation whereby stealth phoning home will be illegal. Yeah, this last bit is probably wishful thinking. On the other hand, if you are uploading/downloading tons of stuff on p2p, then the costs of providing service to you probably exceeds what you are paying. Nevertheless, there is a large incentive for segmenting market between casual and heavy users.

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[Grampaw Willie]

could be

alternatively we might re-examine content and use

Cable systems already have "pay per view" channels and perhaps some of these should be used for streaming music and videos you guys want to access

that might get the data streams for these materials out of the regular internet data channel

too, much of the video and music is copyright material and to access copyright material will require a proper sales agreement.

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[Reziac]

Phonehome-ware can probably dodge that bullet by getting the minimum reporting threshold set at an ordinary non-P2P-user's monthly usage, say 5GB. Even the most verbose phonehome-ware isn't going to come anywhere near that, so would be exempt.

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[mistermiyagi]

The only problem with trying to revert to pay as you go is that no one will do it. We did it already with aol and like services. They started as pay as you go and when they went unlimited they exploded. People do not want pay as you go and the broadband industry would never have existed based on that model. To even attempt to do it would only make people go to the one smart company that decided against going pay as you go and will eventually lead us back here to providers who refuse to upgrade and increase capacity.

  I can see that they are trying to force it on people but the truly smart company will start to secretly increase capacity and then suddenly reduce customer pricing ( by a token amount of course, nothing profit breaking ) advertise it at the "Truly Unlimited Internet" and see the pay as you go model sent to the trash along with all the aol disks.

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with metered usage is that it isn't what their current subscribers already agreed to. If a customer that does a lot of illegal p2p is only offered to be switched over to metered service by AT&T, he will immediately find a new provider. This may be what AT&T wants because the user is not profitable under the old scheme, but even customers that don't use much bandwidth will cancel as well because they are afraid of that $15,000 bill. AT&T has identified itself as a victim of illegal activity on the internet because p2p raises the average bandwidth consumed by each subscriber. The amount of bandwidth they can sell over their capacity is reduced and there are less profits to show for it.

Now AT&T feels that it is justifiable to stop data transfers that are illegal, and has financial incentive to do so. So there is only the technical problem in identifying illegal content on the network. A subcriber being blocked in this manner is more likely to stay with AT&T than one forced into a new payment plan.

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[UnderCoverPenguin]

If metered service is the answer, why are the phone companies offering unlimited long distance plans? My phone bill is a fixed $25 per month (plus another $25 in taxes and surcharges) regardless of my long distance usage. Metering adds a cost to them. Bandwidth is cheep.

Also, something I have noticed (and several of my friends): For services provided by my ISP, there seems to be no bandwidth cap - even for the "free" services. (For example, they offer a streaming service of very old TV shows - for no extra cost over my monthly fee.)

Another observation: I'm paying $60 US per month for 4 Mb/sec. In other countries, 20 Mb/sec or more is common, and at the same, or often less, fee per month.

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[CycoChuck]

First, what I'm paying for is unlimited internet. If they can not provide that then it is a breach of contract. If they are having problems providing unlimited to all their customers, then they need to expand their network instead of slapping a meter on my router. There are hundreds of miles of fiber cable in the ground already that is dark because they decided that they don't need to use it. Light that fiber up and keep giving me unfiltered and unlimited internet.

For those who didn't RTFA...

[SanityInAnarchy]

For those who didn't RTFA, here's the relevant quote:

Were focusing on pirated content over BitTorrent, [not BitTorrent per se.]

Hey, hint, to anyone who thinks this is a legitimate position: That is like saying you're focusing on stopping pornography, not web traffic per se. It doesn't work that way; even when you know what you want to block by domain (myspace.com), you'll be foiled by high school students (and proxies).

And that said, most ISPs are having a hard enough time blocking BitTorrent at all, much less trying to filter specific uses. The sooner you give up trying to filter stuff that your users don't want filtered, the sooner you can focus on a long-term solution that will actually work, like upgrading your network.

On DSL, it bothers me when my housemates use YouTube, and I occasionally try to throttle them, for that reason. When we get 100 mbit fiber, it won't matter.

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[LordSnooty]

When we get 100 mbit fiber, it won't matter.

Hmm, but by then hi-def streaming video will be the norm. The needs of apps always expand to fill the available pipe.

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[Domstersch]

...it bothers me when my housemates use YouTube, and I occasionally try to throttle them

I think we'd all like to throttle some of the people on Youtube.

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm sorry, that wasn't clear:

By "we", I mean my house. It will be within the month, I think.

And you may be right about the high-def content, but I don't think so. YouTube may allow it at some point, but that's not really their target audience.

Also, if I throttle someone on 100 mbit back to 99 mbit, it'll be like having my current connection to myself, and they won't notice at all.

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[Ossifer]

This is what AT&T is specifically trying to avoid. It's not that their last-mile loops are saturated -- it's that their backbone is. With DSL the backbone starts at the central office, with docsis cable, it starts at the back of your computer. This is probably why AT&T hasn't gone as far as Comcast... yet...

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[billcopc]

Not really.

Right now the pipe is artificially small, and has been for over a decade. In 1998 I remember having 3mbit symmetrical DSL for less than what I pay now for what is effectively half-duplex cable. Back in 98, my LAN was 10mbit, the internet was 30% of my line speed - today I'm nearing the end of gigabit's usable lifespan, waiting for the monkeys-that-be to crank out 100gbit ASAP (skip 10gig, too little too late). I'd probably be relatively happy with even just 30mbit symmetrical. I mean, I already have a fat 100mbit pipe on a server in Europe for not much more than my total cable bill here in Canada. It's not a dedicated line, but I really don't mind slowing to 40-50mbit during peak hours. Why can't we have that kind of juice over here, on what is supposed to be a wealthy continent ?

Lay down the goddamned fiber already. It will have to be done at some point, might as well do it now and lease me a chunk of it every month. Weak networking infrastructure is leaving us in the past.

Liar, liar, pants on fire

[gorbachev]

Sure thing, customers are important. Whatever, dude. I guess you're gonna claim NSA is a more important customer than your other customers, next, eh?

Re:Liar, liar, pants on fire

[mozkill]

i totally agree. the first thing I noticed when reading this was the lie that "they care about what the customer thinks." . we all know they only care about profits and methods of getting leverage to raise fees.

Rethink the moral, AT&T!

[Heddahenrik]

Every time someone allows copyright monopolists to steal money from them because they are copying information on the Internet, it is supporting Internet surveillance and hindering information sharing.

Sharing cultural and educational material is essential to our society's survival. Is AT&T against that?

The simply fact is that society doesn't need blood-suckers who resell information for hideous prices. And film-makers can get their income from movie theatres and advertising, and musicians from concerts and sponsors.

AT&T

[damonlab]

Your world, delivered... to the NSA.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[ijakings]

WARNING - - - Cat-like typing detected.

asdlfkj3214^J!#$K% Any cat successfully able to use the shift key and put ^!$ into a post deserves the ability to post on slashdot.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[RadioElectric]

Any cat capable of using the shift key is probably overqualified.

Infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T, Comcast, all of the Tel Coms in America need to upgrade their infrastructure and then we wouldn't be having these problems. Look at Britain. DSL speeds much higher than America, none of these problems, same with most of Europe. But no, the tel coms don't want to cut into their profits even the slightest bit so they can provide the speeds they advertise or the ability to give faster speeds. For 2 times the price I can get 20 times the speed in England. Sometimes I wish one of the World Wars had happened on American soil so we would have been forced to re lay the lines and upgrade them.

Re:Rethink the moral, geek

[Grampaw Willie]

you should be able to tell the difference between copyright material and shared research data

quit all this quibbling already

Customers bedamned... it's ILLEGAL anyway!

[Jane Q. Public]

Your point... AND that it is illegal. Between the two, AT&T should pull its head out of its ass and smell the bacon, RIGHT NOW.

Re:Customers bedamned... it's ILLEGAL anyway!

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T should pull its head out of its ass and smell the bacon, RIGHT NOW. Ok I'm confused, where's the bacon? Do you pop them in the oven first?

Re:Customers bedamned... it's ILLEGAL anyway!

[Jane Q. Public]

Smell the coffee? Smell the excrement? Whatever. Smell the . :o)

So, how do we conact them?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a customer, I consider that sort of filtering as being essentially a betrayal of their customers.

How can I let them know exactly how much I hate that sort of thing? One might think that all the news and complaints to the FCC would do something, but I guess they only listen to people with wads of cash in their hands...

Mu

[Anonymous Coward]

"There's nothing wrong with BitTorrent. There's very legitimate usage, [and] one would hope that it would grow. We're focusing on pirated content over BitTorrent, [not BitTorrent per se.] The only issue is the sheer volume of traffic. It's no different than any other traffic management challenge."

Ok, so the answer is simple: block all BT traffic for normal users, then have an add-on service ($10/mo or whatever) for BT use, to allow people to continue using it but make them pay a bit more to help pay for expanding the network to support the extra traffic. That will solve the issue of traffic management, and may even help reduce the rates for non-BT broadband users. This solution obviously has nothing to do with the distinction between legal and illegal use, however the interview article seems to suggest that AT&T's concern is more over bandwidth usage rather than legality anyway.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[Notquitecajun]

Repeating yourself over and over again doesn't make you more right.

The problem is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that most people who will hate this will be in the middle of multi-year contracts. AT&T will not see a lot of people cancelling at first.

If, by the time your contract is up, every ISP is filtering, you'll be screwed.

Anyone who filterws your traffic is not an ISP. If they call themselves that, it's fraud.

Andy

They are hurting the network

[Sloppy]

I still think the best "solution" to reducing the impact of bittorrent, is to cause bt to become obsolete, by deploying more http caches (*). When downloading a large and popular file (e.g. a WoW update), that file should usually be coming from fairly nearby disk (possibly in the same neighborhood), thereby minimizing the impact on the overall network.

By attacking bt's reliability prior to deploying caches, they are going to encourage users to use encryption to improve the reliability, instead of using better file transfer protocols. When the day comes that they slap their foreheads and decide to deploy more caches, users won't use the caches, because their transfers will be coming through an authenticated tunnel to the source.

They are making the network less trustworthy, instead of improving its value. While I'm kind of glad (for privacy-related reasons) that this might accelerate the adoption of crypto, I can't help but see this as technologically retarded. Popular (i.e. not personal) files have the least need of privacy protection (compared to, say, email) and would have been excellent candidates for caching. If they had gotten downloads to work right, bt would still be rarely used and their network would be in better shape.

(*) Another idea: get people into the idea of "time shifting" large downloads, and then last-mile networks could use multicasting. I'd think cable companies would love that, as that's essentially how TV works.

The way forward should be in place before they attack current conventions, or people won't choose the "best" (depending on your point of view) new conventions. They could have fixed their problem. Instead, people are going to secure their links. What a fuckup.

Re: Unlimited

[rawg]

Your right about the unlimited part, but it also states in their TOS that using bandwidth for illegal downloads, IE pirated music and movies, is not allowed. So when they have 10% of their users using 90% of the bandwidth to illegally download music, movies, and other illegal content they have a right to do something about it and are well within their contract with their users to do so.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[cthulu_mt]

Talking to yourself? You may want to get some counseling.

But there are legal reasons for BitTorrent

[Orion Blastar]

Such as downloading Linux distros and free and open source software.

Some musicians, such as Michael David Crawford release their music in free OGG format with an open source license that allows it to be spread by BitTorrent.

Not only that but Joost and Miro are video players that use P2P and BitTorrent to share videos that are also released into the public domain, open source, and free licenses.

Like I said there are 100% legal reasons for using BitTorrent and P2P filesharing networks. This will hurt the free and open source market more than it cuts down on piracy. It is like giving commercial licenses a free pass and filtering or blocking the free and open source licenses. Some people write articles and howtos via Legal Torrents to promote their web sites in a free or open source license, as well as help out the community.

Re:But there are legal reasons for BitTorrent

[geedra]

if you outlaw p2p, only outlaws will use p2p...oh, wait...

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[Anonymous Coward]

Any cat capable of using the shift key is probably overqualified.

Cat's feet are close together, and they have four of them.

Those "Terms of Service"

[bwcbwc]

As I recall, AT&T reserves the right to change the terms of service with a certain period of advance notice (90 days?). If they want to throttle down current "unlimited" plans to tiered service, they can probably do it as long as they give users the option to cancel service without penalty, and provide sufficient notification as documented in the service agreement.

Third option

[headbulb]

3. Upgrade the network to support the new uses, and get out of the business of spying on people.

Maybe that option is too realistic or perhaps creating proxy servers that avoid att's network.

Re: Unlimited

[Billly Gates]

I run Ubuntu and play Wow with my wife. Both use a ton of bandwith once a month when updating. I really dont pirate like some teenagers who downloads gigs and gigs of files a month. Do I need to suffer as a result?

The wow patch system uses bit torrent. Infact I download ubuntu with bittorent as well with newer releases because their file servers become swamped for weeks when a new release is out.

What about my kids using cam software to talk to their father? Cable companies already filter any encrypted traffic including video. THis is illegal as a common carrier status and a legitimate use.

The contract says do not do illegal things and these are not illegal at all. I pay a ton of money and am stuck with a contract. The contracts should be illegal as the companies have unfair bargaining power as monopolies and oglipolies like the contracts are with the rest of the world.

So yes I have an issue.

AT&T / P2P / Deluge

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a heavy Deluge user, so of course my pipe is always crammed with data, whether upstream or downstream. I found out after the first of the year that my downlink speed was dropped to that of AT&T's "regular plan." I had to call them, they had to come to my apartment, only to call someone else and have them "rebuild" my profile on their system for 600KB/sec downlink.

I need to make myself a tin foil hate..

Marketing Lies and Good Ol' Scams

[EdIII]

I find it interesting that many posts, seemingly off topic, discuss bandwidth issues when the topic is about content filtering. I wonder why that is?

I guess it could be that nobody believes AT&T is fighting for principles here, and that the hidden truth behind content filtering is a frantic need to control usage and not uphold copyrights.

I am sure that AT&T could reap a lot of profits by selling those content filtering services to the MAFIAA, but ultimately the popular belief is that they are trying to reduce bandwidth usage. It's profit and corporate greed. Never mind that it is actually impossible to accomplish over the long term, and that it could open them up to a lot more legal liability.

I question why they have to do this in the first place. If they actually sold you bandwidth that they had, I cannot possibly see how they would be motivated to undertake the largest project in human history. Don't kid yourself, I could write multi-page posts on how the Death Star is less complex and costly to construct then a fully realized content filtering process. They do have one thing in common though, it will be a bunch of teenagers that destroy it. In all seriousness, the Internet is so vastly huge as it is right now, that adding the equipment and manpower to filter all of its transmissions would be as costly as constructing 10+ brand new networks side by side. I honestly believe they could increase the bandwidth of the Internet by a full ORDER with the same resources it would take to filter what we have now. It's patently obvious that this is an attack on P2P. Total filtering of all traffic is just sheer insanity.

So WHY are they doing it? MAFIAA pressures? MAFIAA enticements of IP protection profits? Jiminy Cricket on their shoulders giving them a conscience and instructing them to go after the Pirates?

No. It was some idiots in Marketing that came up with the idea to sell unlimited plans as competition to the old metered plans first offered by AOL and other dialup companies. It was Marketing, which in a Dilbertian twist (Should be a word by now), trumped the IT department and convinced the pointy haired ones to do it. No IT guy EVER would offer unlimited anything. Were just not that stupid. Unlimited = Infinite = IT HELL.

The Marketing Morons, as usual, don't have a dictionary within 500 parsecs of their offices. Their "dictionary" is a popular understanding of marketing buzzwords that give lots of wood to poor customers in order to temporarily relieve them of an judgment when making a purchasing decision. The problem with their dictionary, is that it is created by Marketing Morons for Marketing Morons. That old adage, "Garbage In Garbage Out" certainly applies.

Unlimited -

1) Having no restrictions or controls: an unlimited travel ticket
2) Having or seeming to have no boundaries; infinite: an unlimited horizon.
3) Without qualification or exception; absolute: unlimited self-confidence

The IT guys must of cried, laughed, soiled themselves, and/or committed seppuku when they found out. Obviously the IT guys new that it was not possible to state to each customer an unlimited use of a 4MB/s pipe, since all the customers added up to MORE than the total size of the pipes they possessed. Simple arithmetic showed that, but Marketing Morons get all woozy and run around confused when the math gets dropped on them.

So therein lies the oldest scam in society. Selling more of something then you actually have. It pisses us off, but airlines, movie theaters, medical insurance, and a lot of other businesses do the exact same thing. It only works when you can appease the small amount of people getting screwed, and can grease the government to allow it to happen.

So maybe the real reason why AT&T is making such a big damn fuss is that those huge corporate bonuses are slowly being cut into by the loss of profit that was unethical in the first place.

So for all the posters that make the observation that bandwidth "

Re:asdlfkj3214^J!#$K%JEWKRJL^#!$%DJGASDLKTJ

[jamar0303]

On my keyboard, ^ doesn't need the Shift key. ~, however, is Shift-^.

Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

As AT&T has begun evaluating and testing their filtering technology, BitTorrent users have been left to wonder if they'll suddenly wake to an idle transfer. However, James Cicconi told Slyck.com that AT&T hasn't implemented any filter on their public network just yet. Then will you tell me why, as an AT&T DSL customer, that connections to The Pirate's Bay trackers seem to be blocked on the SBC side - that is, the packets never leave the SBC / AT&T network, and why for the past month, I have had to use Tor to connect?

Little ISP

[IdeaMan]

I was using a little ISP that was seriously overselling their bandwith, and got disconnected from them. Their terms of service had all the usual terms about not running servers, but they also included no VPN, VOIP, P2P, etc. So I followed the rules, only played TFC, D2, surfed websites etc. However, I was unemployed at the time, so was using it for a significant number of hours per day. They blocked me one day, so I called them up.

>Me: What's going on, did my internet got blocked?
>Them: Hang on, let me check...
>...
>...
>Them: Are you on like all the time?
>Me: Yes
>...
>Them: Oh. One moment...
>...
>Them: Ok, you should be back online.

That pause after the yes was priceless :)

Re:Little ISP

[SkipStein]

Yea, AT&T is a prize allright. I tried to switch my DSL from a T1 and tried AT&T. After installation, I couldn't retrieve my POP3/SMTP email from my hosted company web sites. Turns out they block port 25, but just don't tell anyone. I had to cancel right away and switch to roadrunner. I have Embarq DSL at another site and they don't block any ports.

It's really Very Simple

[chicknfood]

ISPs offer a certain Bandwidth at a certain price for unlimited usage. Common sense dictates that they would analyze the bandwidth available to the area divided by the users to come up with that number. Why are these networks unable to deliver on their basic service agreement? It's very simple, give me the speed i paid for, that you claimed you could provide, without restriction.