By now it is well-known that AT&T seeks to become one of worst corporations in the country. Recent mergers with Bell South and SBC have effectively signaled an intent to rebuild the pre-1984 "Ma Bell." Unfortunately, the old saying of "Ma has got you by the calls" is more true than ever...and now she has you by the packets.
Aside from hating net neutrality and working with the NSA "Ma" has now decided to become a nanny for the RIAA and MPAA.
AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.
As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company's top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.
Sadly, Ma Bell's re-emergence makes such action easier than before:
AT&T's decision surprised Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group.
"AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry," she said. "The good news for AT&T is that there's so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?"
...Unfortunately, AT&T has not disclosed how this will work:
The Times story doesn't say whether AT&T plans to implement the anti-piracy tech at Internet end-points, where you connect through your ISP to the Internet, in AT&T's massive backbone network that carries a huge amount of Internet traffic, or both. It also doesn't say whether AT&T will actually look into the files or Web pages you send and receive, or whether it would be a less intrusive analysis of the types of traffic being sent around.
Ma's support for the NSA, RIAA and MPAA and their decision to abandon "common carrier" status is all the more a reason for why we need net neutrality