Privacy Digest

AT&T Exec To Be Grilled Over Network Neutrality This Saturday - Via Threat Level:

Earlier this year, representatives from AT&T, NBC, and Microsoft dropped a rhetorical bomb that again threatened to rupture the detente that has existed between telecommunications companies and their users for at least a decade.

During a panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, representatives from those companies discussed the idea of AT&T implementing filters to block unauthorized access to copyrighted material.

AT&T lobbyist James Cicconi was quoted widely as saying that the company has been working with the MPAA and the RIAA to carry out content filtering on the network level. Here he is in the NYTimes Bits blog:

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a
network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said.
“We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising
technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of
content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various
technologies that are out there.”

As the always-eloquent Columbia professor Tim Wu points out in this Slate essay, this arrangement would overturn the status quo:

... 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.

Wu
speculates that this decision to work with the content companies to
filter what goes across its networks is a political one: It's a cunning
rhetorical disguise to get out of its network neutrality strait-jacket.

AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson re-iterated that the company's still evaluating whether to police its customers just this Wednesday at the World Economic Forum.

THREAT LEVEL readers can tune into an on-going conversation about this controversial subject this Saturday through a Webcast of a discussion
between Wu and  AT&T's Richard Clarke, the company's assistant vice
president for regulatory planning and policy. They'll be speaking at a
day-long network neutrality conference here in San Francisco.

It's worth noting that AT&T has also been involved in a
concerted and so-far successful lobbying effort to get federal
lawmakers to include a telecom immunity provision included in new
legislation that would amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Maybe Wu could ask Clarke what AT&T's current view on customer privacy is, given the latest developments. 

See Also:

• In Test, Canadian ISP Splices Itself Into Google Homepage
• Telecoms' Controversial Policies Spark Senators' Request for ...
• Bush Administration Restates Position on Proposed Internet Traffic ...
• Comcast Using Malicious Hacker Technique Against Own Customers ...
• Whoops! Censored Anti-Bush Remark Was a Mistake, Says Ma Bell

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)