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AT&T To Cut Off Some Customers' Service in Piracy Crackdown (axios.com)
AT&T will alert a little more than a dozen customers within the next week or so that their service will be terminated due to copyright infringement, news outlet Axios reported, citing sources familiar with its plans. From the report: It's the first time AT&T has discontinued customer service over piracy allegations since having shaped its own piracy policies last year, which is significant given it just became one of America's major media companies. AT&T owns a content network after its purchase of Time Warner earlier this year, an entity now called WarnerMedia. Content networks are typically responsible for issuing these types of allegations to internet service providers (ISPs) for them to address with their customers.
What a shithole country!
It's their terms of service, if you violate them (or give them reasonable cause to believe you violated them) then of course they are going to not offer their service to you.
If you invited me to your house and then suspected I had stolen stuff from you would you kick me out? Or would you continue inviting me in until you had obtained proof enough that you could satisfy a court of law?
Wrong analogy.
This is not about invitation to a private house, it is about a publicly offered service, usually provided by a monopoly or an oligopoly. A service sometimes tightly tied to taxpayer funded government services to the point of no being easily available elsewhere.
As such, mere allegations of violations should not be the cause of banishment.
I really don't think content providers and ISP's should be allowed to co-mingle like this. It leads to a situation where you have a company that's positioned itself as a regional monopoly (either naturally, such as access to coax; or through pure evil -- shutting down community broadband, or other competitors) that's able to completely control communication. And in this particular case, if you do something they don't like, they can completely cut you off. Besides, the bigger the company, the more abusive they are to their customers.
ISP's should be dumb pipes for getting whatever bits you request to your box. Letting them do anything else is just inviting disaster.
On a tangent though.. regarding your comment about the internet thriving:
You really don't see how the internet is going from a democratizing thing, where people can freely express their opinions and views.. to a curated swamp of social media that's fed through advertising and monetizing personal information?
The thought that's slowly creeping in is that it's the duty of the gatekeepers (be it google, facebook, reddit, whoever) to censor inconvenient or 'problematic' views. They may dress this up with whatever fashionable terms they like; but it's still censorship. Which can sound nice, at least in the near term since it's fringe views that get shut down. (not many people will stick up for a neo-nazi, or antifa or whoever else goes against the current)
BUT that line, or what constitutes 'acceptable' speech will invariably shift towards the middle -- the definition of "being a troll" or "being a dick".
Also troubling is the desire to abolish privacy. Which again, having these gate-keeping companies acting as the arbiters of online discourse, will result in the death of privacy, and as a result -- the death of free speech.
I'd say instead of thriving, it's grown to the point it's liable to tip-over.
Live by the sword die by the sword. Then I should be able to start a new ISP using the tax payer funded infrastructure they laid down and they better not whine and cry about it.
Now I wonder if they'll also start to check that their customers who play Music On Hold to their victims paid the requisite royalties OR ELSE disconnect them for "piracy". Sauce for the goose, etc.
(Yes, the message is very much implied: ISPs playing copyright cops? Don't go there, idiot ISPs. But of course it's a telco that has to go and be just that stupid.)