Here’s a worrisome report on AT&T’s willingness to inspect packets, filter out what it thinks are copyright violations, and limit peer-to-peer interactions. Because the reporting is sketchy and is coming through an advocacy group (that I support), I’m not perfectly confident that this is the whole story. But as a partial story, it’s damn disturbing. If Net traffic needs to be “shaped” (i.e., packets purposefully blocked or delayed) because of technical limitations, the carriers are the last people I trust to make decisions about what’s important and acceptable. And that, to me, is the essence of the argument for Net neutrality.

[LATER that same day:] And here’s why we shouldn’t trust the carriers to decide what “content” is most important to deliver and to deliver well: According to the NY Times, “Comcast is already the world’s largest buyer of content, and it is spending about $4.5 billion a year to assemble content from around the world to offer on demand.” The people who make money selling content are the last ones who should be deciding which content to prefer./ [Tags: net_neutrality at&t ]

Categories: Uncategorized dw