Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
"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.
You make a valid point, but aren't you overstating the strength of your evidence?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
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.
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."
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.
...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!
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!
We'll make great pets
Or, will all this data processing power be squandered on downloading videos of the shaved pudendum of one Britney Spears?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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)
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
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...
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
WARNING - - - Cat-like typing detected.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.
I posted one, but my ISP filtered the post.
..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?
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
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
I think a lot of businesses would be quite happy to have such an absence of competition in their markets.
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.
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the relevant quote:
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Any cat capable of using the shift key is probably overqualified.
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.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.