When Tim Wu writes something, I almost always enjoy reading it. In yesterday’s Slate Wu wrote a piece that addresses a recent baffling development.
Last week AT&T executives announced that they were busy looking for ways to filter for copyrighted content at the network level. In other words, peak at every packet that crosses the AT&T Internet backbone to see if the data contains stolen intellectual property.
Wu’s Slate piece dissects why this claim would actually be bad for AT&T, and he’s absolutely spot on. Since the earliest days of the phone network the industry has relied on the notion of common carriage: network providers are protected from liability for any information transiting the network in exchange for an agreement to transmit data without selection or modification of that information that moves across that network.
Wu’s claim that AT&T’s filter violates common carriage, however, is spot on. If AT&T were to pursue this strategy it would completely eliminate any claim it has to common carrier status. All of a sudden AT&T is liable for every piece of malice, untruthful information, child pornography or pirated intellectual property that traversed any part of the AT&T network. This would be so ill-advised for AT&T, and Wu’s analogy says it best:
An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world’s largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world’s largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.
My nickel’s worth of free advice to AT&T would be to very publicly make it very clear that the company has no intention of filtering Internet content. ISPs have been trying to get away with a lot recently, but this takes things to a whole new level and runs the risk of violating one of the most central tenants of American political and social culture, that of free speech.
Finally, the Internet is already seeing the challenge from carrying a growing proportion of multimedia traffic. If AT&T stops to take the time to inspect every packet their network performance will fall off the edge of the Earth.
AT&T’s announcement that they might filter content for copyright violation is just such a bad idea on so many levels. Kudos to Tim Wu for describing it thusly in an accessible and colorful piece.
