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Fun with filtering - August 8, 2007

Brian Deagon had a nice connect-the-dots on content filtering in yesterday's Investor's Business Daily, stitching together comments from AT&T general counsel Jim Cicconi and those of GE vice-chairman Bob Wright from a speech in June.

The long and the short of it: AT&T has already announced its commitment to network-level filtering and Wright hinted broadly that six of the eight largest ISPs in the U.S. are edging toward a similar position.

The two outliers, according to Deagon's sources, are Comcast and Verizon, although even those two are at the table talking, according to my sources.

The piece also features quotes from Fred von Lohmann at EFF, and a statement from Public Knowledge, both pooh-poohing the idea as unworkable.

But in a recent article on Ars Technica , Nate Anderson isn't so sure.

Anderson talked to execs at network equipment makers Ellacoya and Procera to provide a highly readable primer on recent advances in deep packet inspection technology. Though Anderson doesn't directly address the question of filtering copyrighted content, the capabilities he describes--to my non-technical eyes--would seem to go a pretty good way toward making it technically possible, if not today than soon.

As a case in point he offers plus.net, a British ISP that already offers tiered service based not simply on how much bandwidth is used, but on how it's used.

"Plans start at £9.99 (around $20) a month for just 1GB of data, though use after 10 PM appears not to count for this quota. The lowest price tier also does not support gaming and places severe speed controls on FTP and P2P use (allowing only 50Kbps at peak periods). Plus.net says that the lowest tier will not work adequately with online games or corporate VPNs. Paying £29.99 (around $60) a month provides 40GB of data transfer and fast P2P and FTP speeds, along with 240 VoIP minutes from the company. All of these tiers feature downloads speeds of up to 8Mbps"

How do they do it? By using Ellacoya gear to examine the the content of packets going over their network.

According to Ellacoya, their technology makes it possible for individual users on a network to have their own set of use-rules (based on how much they pay or other criteria) that can be enforced in real-time.

In fact, they make such content-based filtering sound not just possible but damn-near inevitable as network data loads grow exponentially.

"Throwing bandwidth at the problem can't solve it," Ellacoya's CEO told Anderson. No matter how much bandwidth you deploy, P2P traffic, Usenet, FTP and streaming video will fill it. The only out will be to inspect the payloads of packets to decide what should happen to them.

Of course, achieving the technical means to filter content does not address the legal questions that inevitably will arise with respect to copyrighted content. While content may be copyrighted, its  transit could still be legal.

Deciding whether the ultimate use to which a particular packet will be put is legal is not a question that hardware--no matter how sophisticated--is capable of resolving. But if the means are there, the pressure to use them will be overwhelming, making confronting the legal questions inevitable.

UPDATE: As if to prove the point, this afternoon Pearl Jam posted an item on the band's web site accusing AT&T of censoring a portion of the Web cast of group's Sunday night performance at Lollapalooza.

"When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them," the group said.

Content monitor?

Well, it was a live Webcast, you see. And given the sensitivity these days about pop stars saying and doing naughty things in front of the kiddies, AT&T employs folks to bleep out any profanity that might be emitted.

The deleted content in this case involved lyrics that were critical of President Bush.

Public Knowledge was quick to condemn AT&T.

"How can we trust a company that promises not to interfere with content on the Internet when it has its corporate finger on the button to cut off political criticisms it doesn’t like?" PK president Gigi Sohn said in a statement. "The admitted censoring of a Pearl Jam performance is just one more reason why content should be protected against the actions of a company looking out for itself, rather than for consumers and the free flow of information over the Internet."

Of course, the censorship, if that's what it was, had nothing to do with copyright. As the sponsor of the Webcast, in fact, AT&T presumably owns the copyright in the footage that was censored, or a least has a license to perform it. So if there was filtering going on, they were filtering their own content, which is not quite the same thing as filtering subscribers' content.

Still, it's certainly enough to start an argument.



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