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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."
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.
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."
...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
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?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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
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 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
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.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
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!