Has AT&T Gone Daft?

I know that AT&T was taken over by new management when acquired by Cingular a few years ago. But you'd think that the people running any major telecommunications company would have some grasp on the essentials of the business, and of its legal underpinnings.

For years, telecom carriers have gone out of their way to avoid looking at traffic passing over their networks. But AT&T has decided to end that trend, as this C/NET report shows:

For the past several months, AT&T executives have said the company is testing technology to filter traffic on its network to look for copyrighted material that is being illegally distributed. James Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs for AT&T, reiterated the carrier's plans last week during a panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

In other words, AT&T would play Internet traffic cop for some reason or another. But why? This has to be the biggest mudhole a corporation could want to sink in.

The customer service problems are obvious. How many complaints can one organization field from outraged customers who are sure that what they are trying to send, receive, or view online is perfect legal? Many of them might even be right...

But the big problem is not even customers, but legal liability, as Tim Wu wrote in Slate. AT&T was one of the prime forces behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which, among other things, shielded telecoms from liability of copyright infringement, et. al., so long as they didn't poke into the content they carried and selectively choose what they would and wouldn't allow to pass.

Once a company starts sticking its nose into the content and making transmission decisions based on it, however, the protection pretty much disappears. And that's exactly the pit AT&T is about to enter. Now the recording industry can sue not only people who download illegal copies of songs, but potentially AT&T if its networks are carrying the traffic. And as the company has perhaps the biggest single share of Internet traffic, and as technology is never perfect and always screws up, chances are that AT&T will find itself liable in this and many other situations.

What did the "new" AT&T do? Fire anyone at the old AT&T who might have had a clue about risk and liability? Or were they just people with "old fashioned" views who obviously couldn't be as smart as those that acquired the company? At least the lawyers will be happy.

Qwest Gets Caught Tilting Survey Results in Ad

Telecom carrier Qwest decided to run a comparative ad, showing how people "preferred" its broadband service to that of rival Comcast. But there are good reasons never to base a marketing campaign on shaky numbers: you could get caught. That's exactly what happened to Qwest in this Rocky Mountain News article, from organizing response segments to make themselves look good to trying to ignore a margin of error high enough to call all the results into question.