Another Threat to Net Neutrality: Copyright Cops

It sounds like AT&T is cooking up a new plan to get Internet users, media activist and media scholars all hot and bothered. It’s a new front against Net Neutrality both on an ideological and technical level. The plan is that AT&T will somehow create a technology to monitor their mammoth network, searching out copyrighted material uploaded to the Internet. According to a good article by Geoff Duncan at Digital Trends, this is the first time a large Internet provider has assumed the role of “copyright cop.” Because such a move will mean AT&T will creep into and discriminate against the content of Internet users’ traffic, this plan raises all sorts of ethical concerns as well as questions about what the unintended technological effects could be (Duncan suggests a new round of technology wars between providers and uploaders and problems uploading copyrighted material even when its legal) . Net Neutrality, Digital IP Rights, Surveillance . . . if AT&T continues to pursue this plan I suspect all these hot themes might help awaken some media theorists from their activist slumber.

AT&T and other big telecommunication companies clearly seem to be losing the battle of minds in their fight against net neutrality. Every segment of the public, once aware of the issue, seems to strongly favor an Internet in which all users can access any startup webpage creator’s site just about as easily as big corporate sites. The arguments offered by the telecommunication companies in their astroturf faux-populist campaign against Net Neutrality (Hands Off the Internet) have been glaringly pathetic: the smokescreen claim that Net Neutrality laws would be a layer of bureaucracy, the spurious claim that telecoms need to charge content providers for a new sources of revenue to build network infrastructure up and out, and, my personal favorite, the if-there-ain’t-a-problem-yet-why-fix-it argument. But now they’re trying to tap into an issue that the public seems more genuinely conflicted about – intellectual property rights and piracy.

In addition to Duncan’s article, you can find out more about AT&T’s plan on a Huffington Post entry by Josh Silver. It looks like this idea first surfaced to the public at large through an interview with AT&T Vice President James Ciccino printed in the L.A. Times. More general info on Net Neutrality and the campaign to keep can be found on the Save the Internet homepage.