AT&T may follow Comcast in monitoring Internet traffic

Addressing the issue of global piracy on the Internet, the head of one of the world's largest telcos told no less than Earth's biggest economic summit that some kind of technological solution may be necessary.

At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum yesterday, during a roundtable of world business leaders, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was apparently speaking to the issue of Internet service providers' responsibility with regard to the theft of intellectual property. There, according to the Associated Press, Stephenson said he would not be opposed to his company filtering the types of traffic where intellectual property theft more commonly takes place, implying P2P.

"It's like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?" the AP quotes Stephenson as saying.

The CEO's statement comes two weeks after the company's senior-most legal official, James Cicconi, told a roundtable of technology leaders at CES 2008, as reported by The New York Times, that his company was open to discussions with content and technology industry leaders to discover a solution to the problem of IP infringement trafficking over its network.

"What we are already doing to address piracy hasn't been working," the Times quotes Cicconi as saying two weeks ago. "There's no secret there." He specifically named NBC Universal, whose representative was also on that CES panel, as one company with which he'd consider opening a dialog.

That statement suggests that, while AT&T is actively pursuing a way to stop being neutral on the issue of copyright infringement traffic, it isn't exactly ready to embrace Comcast's apparent solution to the matter. It was the AP itself that first discovered last October, through its own testing (which was unprecedented for a press agency), that Comcast actively samples its traffic for headers that point to P2P, and throttles the speed of P2P traffic it finds.

The US Federal Communications Commission is currently investigating whether such throttling is legal under current telecommunications guidelines, in response to public complaints.

The fact that AT&T has said it would prefer a technological solution to the matter -- especially from the telco's chief lawyer -- indicates that it is leaning against litigation as a counter-offensive tactic. That strategy has not gone well for the music industry, whose international representative reported just this morning an even steeper decline for overall music sales in 2007.