Um, what? And by that I mean to say, What the fuck?:
During a panel discussion at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, AT&T’s top lobbyist said the company was ready to implement new technologies that would allow it to inspect and filter Web traffic....According to public statements, their rationale for playing traffic cop is to ferret out pirated content: sniffing through our digital packets for material that infringe on copyright.
But the technology can be used for other purposes, and the phone giant has shown that it has no qualms invading our communications to hand over our private records to government, or censor speech or block service “without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.”...
AT&T has also touted plans to become gatekeepers to the Web with public relations bromides about “shaping” Web traffic to better serve the needs of an evolving Internet.
Who the hell died and put AT&T in charge of deciding who should see what on the Internet?
Peer-to-peer traffic is spreading via popular technologies like BitTorrent and Gnutella, which allow users to upload and share videos, music and other rich media without a middleman or content gatekeeper. The bulk of this traffic is legal.Also at the Las Vegas panel was NBC Universal’s general counsel Rick Cotton, who told the Times that the volume of peer-to-peer traffic online was “overwhelming.”
“That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” Cotton said, and AT&T seems more than happy to step in.
So, AT&T has decided that you should not be to share legal files directly with other independent Internet users. And its spokespeople are willing to say this out loud, in public, on the record.
It makes you wonder what really nefarious stuff the corp is keeping secret. And it makes you wonder why the hell anyone would choose AT&T as their ISP.
(Technorati tags: net neutrality, AT&T)
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