At the very end of last year, Australia passed legislation to implement nationwide, opt-out censorship of online porn and violence, requiring so-called “clean feeds” of its Internet service providers to protect the country’s children.
Until recently, the role of ISPs in the United States has been to provide unfiltered Internet access to users. But as of last week, there’s buzz that American ISPs may also start to engage in censorship (and some argue they already have) – though not by government order and definitely not under the guise of protecting anyone’s children.
Rather, AT&T said at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week that it may begin monitoring content on its networks to block downloads that violate copyright. According to ISP-Planet, as of Q3 2007, AT&T was the biggest ISP in the U.S., with just over 18% market share. So what AT&T does would have a significant impact on many Internet users in this country and would likely cause AT&T’s competitors to take note and possibly buckle to pressure from groups that are fighting tooth-and-nail to enforce copyright law. The music industry, which gave up on DRM just last week, is now toying with the idea of “digital watermarks,” which will track the movement of a file across P2P sites and ostensibly be used to make ISPs filter such content. From the New York Times’ Bits blog:
Mr. Cicconi [SVP, external & legal affairs for AT&T] said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the M.P.A.A. and R.I.A.A., for the last six months about carrying out digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.
“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.”
It’s a bit strange that AT&T would be in such close cahoots with the RIAA and MPAA; unlike its competitor, Time Warner, which has a hand in the ISP world but also owns plenty of media companies that would surely be thrilled if it decided to block illegal downloads, AT&T’s core business is communications – i.e., they don’t make any media (read: music or movies) the average consumer wants to steal. Granted, it’s a legal issue, but why enforce this instead of going after something more egregiously wrong? Isn’t, say, visiting a child pornography site, which the Australian government railed against, just a titch more reprehensible than illegally downloading music?
Also strange is that just prior to Ciccone’s comments, the FCC had announced that it will investigate America’s second-biggest ISP, Comcast, in follow-up to November 2007 claims from users that say it limited their access to P2P sharing sites. Comcast may face fines up to $1.77 trillion if found guilty, but denies any wrongdoing.
Note that while ISPs are poising themselves to become Internet cops, in which direct benefit to them is unclear, their monitoring isn’t just wrapped up in altruism for the RIAA. They are also looking for ways into the online ad revenue game: Less than two weeks ago, ClickZ reported that ISPs have begun to collect user data for behavioral ad targeting purposes, which seems now like it will be rife with privacy issues.
