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Can you hear Verizon now? - January 31, 2008

It wasn't that long ago that MPAA sources were telling Media Wonk they were still hopeful of persuading Verizon to follow the lead of AT&T in committing to filtering copyrighted content from its network. But yesterday's comments by the telco's top policy exec, Tom Tauke, at a Congressional Internet Caucus event should put those hopes to rest. "From a business perspective, we really don't want to assume the role of being police on the Internet," the former GOP congressman from Iowa said. "We are leery of using these technologies on our networks."

By "these technologies," Tauke meant the kind of deep-packet inspection technology AT&T is apparently working on in an effort to block IP packets based on their content payload. "We don't want to get into the business of inspecting the bits and figuring out what is and is not appropriate traffic," he said. Among other things, Verizon fears, that could lead to a kind of mission creep, inviting pressure from Congress and regulators to start blocking pornography, online gambling and other kinds of out-of-favor content.

Verizon knows whereof it speaks on that last point, having caught hell last year for initially refusing to send out SMS messages from NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League. That episode has now become part of a multi-pronged FCC investigation into network management that also includes Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent traffic. The FCC opened the proceeding January 14 and has already received over 28,000 comments from the public with nearly a month left to go in the comment period.

Far from embracing filtering, in fact, Verizon is actually cooperating with peer-to-peer networks through the P4P Working Group to develop protocols for speeding P2P traffic without overly burdening the ISP's network.

“We know we’re going to have this traffic on our network,” Verizon Technology Group principal engineer Doug Pasko told Media Wonk at CES. “It’s a huge part of our volume now. When we saw the...research and realized what [the protocols] could mean in terms of cost savings, we decided we needed to come up with a way to share our topographical information in a way to make it possible.”

Verizon's pragmatic approach to network management and P2P traffic has to be considered a major blow to the content companies, who were hoping that major ISPs' growing interest in distributing content themselves would make them more open to cooperating on filtering. Like AT&T, Verizon is pushing aggressively into video distribution through its FiOS network in an effort to compete with cable MSOs. Content owners were hoping that Verizon's need to license programming for its TV service would give them leverage on filtering. So far, however, it doesn't appear to be working.
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