Should AT&T police the Internet?

Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 16 January 2008
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A decade after the government said that AT&T and other service providers don't have to police their networks for pirated content, the telecommunications giant is voluntarily looking for ways to play traffic cop.

For the past several months, AT&T executives have said the company is testing technology to filter traffic on its network to look for copyrighted material that is being illegally distributed.

AT&T's plans would turn the nation's largest telephone company into a kind of network cop, a role that some say could turn dangerous for the company. For one, filtering packets to determine whether they contain copyrighted material raises privacy concerns.

AT&T argues that it must get involved in stopping the flow of pirated content because much of this content is shared using peer-to-peer protocols, which eats up valuable network bandwidth, slowing network connections for many of its customers.

Oh joy, I was just testing encrypted P2P solutions. But really, ISPs have no right to spy on their customers. Everytime they come up with the "online experience" reason to fight P2P. What they do is, in fact, degrade this experience for those users who use P2P. And the ISPs don't prohibit the usage of filesharing applications on their network; something they could easily add to the contracts. But they know that customers will leave them, and they don't want that. Istead, they call P2P the biggest evil on their networks and fight it while trying to keep users who want to share. What's next on their list? Crippling Youtube usage? Let's go back to acoustic coupler, ok?