AT&T can't seem to catch a break these days. I mean, they really only want to do what's right for their customers, why does everyone hate them? First, they try and save our lives by aiding the NSA in their wire-tapping program (some called that program illegal, but seriously, we all know that this administration would never do anyting illegal-like) Then, they caught some flack because they reserved the right to cancel a subscribers service if they had anything negative to say about AT&T (come on people, we all know that line was put into their TOS to protect us all from child pornographers). Well now they are trying to protect us from those ellusive child pornographers again! This time, they just want to monitor and restrist our access to download and share files, and people are still giving them flack about it! In all seriousness, AT&T is conserdering adding a network monitoring technology to their network called Vobile that works similar to Google's new You Tube tech. Networks will donate bodies of work to AT&T, who will then add these to their monitoring database. All download traffic will then go through this database and compare the "digital signal" of the download to the database, and if there is a match, cancel the download (and presumably levy fines, cancel service, etc.). They want to spin this practice by saying that it will protect against child pornography (this is starting to sound like a broken record) , but by the very definition of the technology, they would have to have the child pornography on file in order to protect against it... that sounds slighty counter-productive to me.
For some reason, AT&T can't figure out why Net Neutrality advocates are not happy with this concept. This kind of technology would enable AT&T to start discriminating against customers based on bandwidth usage and download sizes, most likely leading to tiered internet pricing. The conspiracy theorist in me would even say that this could lead to data discrimination based on business partnerships. Is it so hard to imagine that AT&T customers would no longer be able to watch ABC' shows online if they chose not to partner with AT&T?
In any case, it looks like AT&T has been testing this technology for a few months now and will likely put it into practice by late 2008.
AT&T to Get Tough on Piracy [Business Week]--
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