AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter Your Traffic
Brad Stone writes on The New York Times' Bits Blog:
For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.More here.
But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.
Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
posted by Fergie @ 1/08/2008 05:35:00 PM
1 Comments:
This will become interesting. The FCC has decided to investigate Comcast's practice of filtering bittorrent traffic.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gyYIyHWl3sEg1ZktvVRLdlmQ5hpwD8U1UOFO0
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9845889-7.html
Choice quotes from the AP article:
The Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday.
...
Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged after the AP story that it was "delaying" some of the traffic between computers that share files.
Post a Comment
<< Home