AT&T’s Big Brother Plans

This sounds crazy but an AT&T executive James Ciccioni has raised the idea of monitoring every single packet traveling over its Internet network to see if intellectual property violations are happening.

Slate’s Tim Wu picked on this bizarre notion – something he described as Orwellian. Since when did AT&T start to position itself as an IP policeman? Has it started to cave into pressure from the music and movie industrial for tighter regulation on how people use the Internet?

Along with Time-Warner’s plans to charge for broadband service by how much traffic you generate, it’s difficult not to sense that the broadband market in the U.S. is changing as ISPs look at new ways to impact how their customers use a service that has evolved into a utility.

Maybe AT&T thinking is not unlike how electrical utilities monitor usage, and how they can sometimes work with the police if they determine that a household is, for example, using an extraordinary amount of power (An indication of a grow-house being operated).

Is it time for broadband to be regulated? – as much as it pains me to suggest the idea. If ISPs are monitoring how customers use broadband, maybe there’s a need for someone to be monitoring the monitors.

More: Boing Boing’s Joel Johnson calls AT&T idea “retarded”, while CNet has an extensive analysis story.

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