Has AT&T Lost Its Mind? | Hacker News Reader

Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?

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30 pointsbrett5 comments

Couldn't offending sites simply use ssl?

Illegal pictures of Britney Spears? I get the vague feeling that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Also, any amount of traffic filtering can be done on the side without slowing down the traffic. You can always kill the rest of the packets after letting a few through.

Um, there are lots of pictures of Britney that are copyrighted and therefore technically illegal to distribute over a network, except for purposes protected by fair use. Indeed, I'm sure that most of her pictures are under copyright. Do you know of any CC-licensed Britney videos?

Whether or not anyone still intentionally downloads B.S. photos is another matter... but, you know, law professors don't tend to be teenagers. They don't keep up with these things.

I know that on one hand, I'm nitpicking. But on the other hand, it makes me queasy when some guy discusses the merits of IP-related policy without knowing the facts. How can he say that AT&T has lost its mind if he doesn't even realize that AT&T is probably after people that are torrenting movies and mp3s around the clock, not those swapping pictures of Britney? And if AT&T is talking to the MPAA and RIAA, part of the bargain will certainly be that AT&T gets to keep their legal immunities, even if it means that the lobbyists are going to have to change the law. In any case, the underground traffickers of celebrity photos are going to stay unaffected.

There must be some subtly behind AT&T's contemplations. They may have decided that they are losing money on certain of their customers, and as a regulated monopoly that can't just raise prices, they may have to resort to legalities such as this in order to eliminate customers, which as an action they deem more efficient than laying down additional infrastructure.

As far as I know, the price regulation doesn't generally extend to internet connectivity (it's for voice lines)... except for the lowest tier connection they offer (that mythical dry loop 768k line for $10/mo)... and the phone reps will actively deny that account option even exists unless you insist that you know it does.

My guess is they want to start a content delivery system of some sort to sell music/video to a captive audience (their customers) and just want to prepare the ground for blocking out competing pirated content.

This guy doesn't make the best argument in the world, but I think the privacy issues of this alone should kill it. Legal or illegal, I don't want some third party eavesdropping on everything I do online.

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