Panopticon

I read the strangest thing today. AT&T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology designed to keep 'pirated content' off of it's network.

This is such a significant departure from the typical pipe model of common carrier behavior that I thought that this was a joke. As a common carrier, AT&T is provided with a series of privileges such as antitrust and right of way which gives it significantly greater rights than your average corporation.

The whole notion of rights for a corporation throws me into fits, but that will be the topic for another day...

The San Antonio-based telco started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior VP, told the “Los Angeles Times.”

Now that AT&T has begun selling pay-TV services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi told the “Times.”

Earlier this month, about 20 technology executives from Viacom, its Paramount movie studio and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the FCC, the “Times” reported.

As a gentle reminder, AT&T is the same group that was caught providing illegal access to the NSA described here and detailed here. They are now publicly declaring that they want to actively peer into inter user traffic of US citizens. Again, they have no obligation to do this - it is simply play towards better relationships with content providers. I am dumbfounded that this is legal.

NBC Universal has been one of the big drivers behind this push to outsource the work of filtering to the ISPs. NBC's general counsel Rick Cotton recently told the FCC that ISPs should be forced to "use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content." Otherwise, corn farmers could be harmed.

An exec at GE, which owns NBC Universal, later praised the idea in a keynote speech to the telecommunications industry and indicated that his company was quite serious about it.

What to do about this I am not sure. Getting out of my AT&T broadband contract might be a beginning, but as a tier 1 ISP, they touch a significant percentage of all internet traffic at one point or another.

I am, for the time being, ignoring the fact that you can not tell what the legal status of content that you are looking at is. This is all such condescending bullshit.

Common notions of privacy are suffering the death of a thousand cuts. Feh. It is late so I am going to bed.