Now it seems other ISPs might start doing even more.
At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, 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.
Network-level filtering means your ISP could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, a major content provider, said “The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status. The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”
Internet civil rights groups have cried foul. They claim that filtering amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block out legitimate content or even content the ISP wanted to block for its own reasons. With all the consolidation in the media and communications industries it’s not hard to imagine that a company that is an ISP and a content provider, like Time Warner or Cablevsision, could affect legitimate traffic from competitors.
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