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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."
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.
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.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
'cell' isn't a reference to cell phones.
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.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
http://www.consumer.att.com/plans/internet/
Get unlimited high-speed Internet access over your existing phone line at great low rates.
So fucking stupid, it's no wonder you post as AC.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.