Digital piracy

pic by: yasmapaz
Subtle right? Stupid AT&T

I'm getting on the bandwagon to react to this nonsense that AT&T is proposing vis-a-vis filtering the Internet traffic on their network. I'm agin it because it's bad for everyone. However, I'm going to give the folks at AT&T the benefit of the doubt and say they're not stupid. So, that being the case, what's their angle?

Here's the story: At CES in a panel discussion, a rep from AT&T said that AT&T was considering how they could filter traffic carried by their network for copyrighted work. Here's a better write-up of it than I can provide at the NY Times.

Now the thing about this is that it works for no one. Tim Wu (who's apparently a Columbia Law School prof.) gives a good account here on Slate. To sum up:

1. Bad for the customer - who wants Big Brother snooping in your internet requests?
2. Bad for the network (and the customer) - looking at each individual packet will slow down the network considerably.
3. Bad for AT&T - Looking at the traffic on their network makes AT&T potentially liable for anything illegal happening on their network. A whole new business model could spring up that revolves around fishing for law suits against AT&T - a deep pocketed and suddenly unprotected cash cow.
4. Bad for AT&T - it's a PR nightmare for all the reasons above, but particularly 1 and 2. Given the increasing competition in this field you'd think AT&T would be interested in keeping customer satisfaction high.

So the question is, if it's bad for us and it's bad for them, what the hell's the angle?

At B-school I sometimes get the impression that they give you the option of having your social and moral conscience excised early, but that generally doesn't end up removing your sense of self-interest in your private life. Corporations do bad things all the time, but usually that means mining the skulls of African babies for profitable Chlorofluorocarbons. It's reprehensible, but the people who greenlight the idea are fairly secure they're not African. Or babies.

In this case though, the execs and their friends and families will be using the network. Do they want it to go slower? Do they want to have their teenager dragged off to jail for illegal copying? Or worse, what if (and I know this kind of thing never happens) this test for internet crime turns up a few false positives?

So again, what's the damn angle? Are the mega-corporations circling the wagons to protect against digital piracy? Is this the wedge that AT&T uses to defeat net neutrality once and for all? The only way that works is if we see some real oligopoly-type behavior.

If you can figure this out, leave a comment, because to me it just seems crazy. My best guess so far is that AT&T is trying to drive Apple away in the next round of contract renewal over the iPhone. Apple's notoriously difficult to work with, so maybe they hope to become anathema to Apple's geeky fanbase. See, pretty crappy guess that.