Has AT&T Lost Its Mind? A baffling proposal to filter the Internet.

Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?
A baffling proposal to filter the Internet.
By Tim Wu
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 10:15 AM ET


Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T's network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself. If I were a shareholder, I'd want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

The puzzle is how AT&T thinks that its proposal is anything other than corporate seppuku. First, should these proposals be adopted, my heart goes out to AT&T's customer relations staff. Exactly what counts as copyright infringement can be a tough question for a Supreme Court justice, let alone whatever program AT&T writes to detect copyright infringement. Inevitably, AT&T will block legitimate materials (say, home videos it mistakes for Hollywood) and let some piracy through. Its filters will also inescapably degrade network performance. The filter AT&T will really need will be the one that blocks the giant flood of complaints and termination-of-service notices coming its way.

But the most serious problems for AT&T may be legal. Since the beginnings of the phone system, carriers have always wanted to avoid liability for what happens on their lines, be it a bank robbery or someone's divorce. Hence the grand bargain of common carriage: The Bell company carried all conversations equally, and in exchange bore no liability for what people used the phone for. Fair deal.

AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Today, in its daily Internet operations, AT&T is shielded by a federal law that provides a powerful immunity to copyright infringement. The Bells know the law well: They wrote and pushed it through Congress in 1998, collectively spending six years and millions of dollars in lobbying fees to make sure there would be no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications"—content AT&T carries over the Internet. And that's why the recording industry sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon, when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.

Here's the kicker: To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content." Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world's largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.

more...

http://www.slate.com/id/2182152

really strong on copyright protection, and furthermore do not EVER send copyright-infringing material over the Internet.

But if they start doing this, I'll cancel my ISP account with them in a heartbeat.

Then I'll cancel my satellite TV service, landline and cellphone accounts as well.

They'll never get ONE CENT from me ever again.

Redstone

:toast:

Redstone

Now most of its officers are in jail for
"insider trading" and securities fraud.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Redstone

I don't think they split their cables to the feds.

Redstone

At&T bought our local phone carrier here. If I want a landline, or internet service over same, it will be through them. My other option, phone and/or internet service over cable, would be through Comcast, and they're just as bad (and they have high rates and abysmal service.)

Since apparently maintaining competition isn't a big concern anymore, most people are in a similar situation.

I have no choice but AT&T here. Tried to switch to Working Assets and guess what? AT&T has to do some switching which they conveniently didn't get around to, will never get around to. A year later, I'm still with AT&T.

so if they're your local carrier, chances are if you switch to somebody else you'd have to get a new number. They did that to my Dad this summer, and he's had the same landline number since I was a toddler.

and mauled by two dogs and my employer wouldn't let me sign out because I hadn't been there six months. My mom had to take him to the hospital. I was too young and too broke to tell them to go f%ck themselves.

but a trip to the ER is, pretty much by definition, an emergency. And g'parents usually can't sign consent forms, so usually parents have to go unless somebody else (like a daycare provider) has paperwork that lets them act in loco parentis.

I might have been able to press the issue but, at the time all I could think was that I needed that job.

So, I sat there.

But you are right, the interesting question is why these weasels are so eagerly looking for trouble?

This is NOT about protecting "intellectual property." This is about ATT protecting ATT.

This is NOT a consequence of 9/11.

- sentence filtered -

That's a good one. They would be suing everyone in the country. BS. I am just so sick of all of it.

And Congress sits and sits and does nothing.

Because AT&T DSL gets more like dial up everyday. This pretty much makes my mind up about it, and I will mention it, along with their marriage with the NSA, when I tell them I'm canceling.

as the liability they expose themselves to would be enough to kill the company, and then some.

stop. If we REALLY were able to get every single person -- or a sizable majority -- to cancel all AT&T services, I'm pretty sure we'd get their attention.
But they know that's not going to happen. We'll allow that to happen -- one more step -- like we've allowed all that's come before.

I don't know how to wake Americans up!

And now, they've got us MORE over a barrel with the cost of living, food, housing getting beyond our reach. Our priorities are rightly with feeding and housing our families.

Nice country, Bush.

This would be an admittedly large addition to the iceberg, but the fact of the matter is that this pup has been growing a long time and can sink things much larger than the Titanic. Private companies have been routinely spying on the people for a couple of decades now. Cameras are becoming ubiquitous and most of them are in private hands. Microsoft installs back doors, Onstar listens in on your car conversations, and you are traced via that corporate cell phone you carry. It is too much to list here, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of this data is easily available to the government, especially in this day and age of Homeland Security and Fear.

So the question is how to fight this Orwellian encroachment. Boycott these people? A hard proposition in and of itself, since data and images are routinely recorded and stored in virtually all retail chains. Besides,boycotts have a mixed track record at best, and the scope of this would simply be too big. Turn to our representatives in Washington?:rofl: They're the ones who've enabled this rise of surveillance. The drug war, the war on terror, the Constitution just scraps of paper now.

So do we take another path, the path of revolt? That way lies violence and madness, a road we really don't want to trod. Which leaves us battling this out in the political arena. Traditional politics haven't worked out, so we need a radical change. Publicly financed elections would be a large step towards that change, taking the corporate money factor out of our government.

There is only one candidate in the Democratic race that backs publicly financed elections, and that's Kucinich. Once again, this man is right on the issues and knows what is best for this country, what this country needs to do to survive. Why vote against your interests, we keep coming back to that question time and time again when trying to figure out conservatives. We need to ask ourselves that question, why are we voting for corporately controlled candidates, against our own interests, time and again. Hillary, Obama, Edwards are all bought and paid for, none of them have our interests, the interests of this country and the ordinary person first and foremost in their minds. No, they have the interests of GE and AT&T and Exxon first, middle and last in their minds, and we aren't even acknowledged except for every couple of years when we go through the formality of voting against our own interests.

It is past time that we stopped voting against our own interests. Otherwise we're all going to continue this collective slide into the abyss. Don't vote for corporate controlled candidates. Instead let's wrest control of our government away from Corporate America and give it back to we the people.

In fact I'm trying to figure out how to do it. They bought out my local phone company, and ever since then, my service sucks swamp water. My land line reception is crappy and my DSL is erratic (this was not the case before the buy-out). They send me E-mails apologizing for the frequent service interruptions, but they haven't stopped charging me DSL prices for what amounts to dial-up quality. I am not in a good mood right now, because I just spent over fifteen minutes waiting for that fourth bar on my modem to turn green so I could post this message!

I finally broke down and bought a cell phone from working assets this very evening. Now, if I can find an alternate DSL provider, I'm ready to ditch the land line. I suppose I could get it through Cox Cable, but I've had very bad experiences with them in the past as well.

Even though I like apple and think it's cool. I despise AT&T enough not to give them one red dime unless I absolutely have to. This is total BS.

What if this is a very twisted plan to sabotage the net as we know it, so that a "new" version can rise in it's place -- a new, corporate version?

This is the sort of thing that could do it -- a primary backbone commits suicide, knowing that the phoenix will rise again from the ashes, a more controlled version, that is.

What if?

Figuratively, of course. Just like he meant it.

How would they even accomplish it? Similar technical details were discussed here on DU not long ago, with the law proposed by Adam Walsh/McCain (I think) to police the internet for illegal images. The law would have also required wireless router owners to report illegal image transmission across their networks, on pain of heavy fines. You can imagine how cafe owners, who generally have no knowledge of things like data transmission, feel about that one.

The problem lies in that so much data is transmitted every single day. Billions of messages and files going back and forth. Another problem is that the data is disassembled and sent in 'packets.' It's only really intact at two points: the originating computer, and the receiving one. Even if you caught it mid-stream, it'd have to be reassembled.

Assuming they had no trouble reassembling every packet of data sent across the internet, they'd then have to examine everything they found. You'd be hard pressed to develop a program capable of assessing legality with 100% accuracy. So, you'd need people. Lots and lots of people doing nothing but examining random files 24/7. Even then, the work would pile up much faster than it gets cleared out.

thier stinking services.

Or AT&T internet service?

.