AT&T's Latest Out-of-Control Net Neutrality-Killing Scheme
When we talk about an Internet without Net Neutrality, we often describe a world in which companies like AT&T and Verizon can block you from visiting certain websites, slow down your Netflix videos, charge you extra for Facebook, censor your speech and make it harder for you to get online. Bad stuff.
But if these behaviors — which these companies are keen to enact ASAP — don’t get under your skin, maybe these words will: “permissible data.”
The phrase belongs to a patent AT&T has filed. It describes how the company could restrict an Internet user from “consuming an excessive amount of channel bandwidth by restricting use of the channel in accordance with the type of data being downloaded to the user.
Permissible data, the patent notes, “includes file-sharing files and movie downloads if user subscription does not permit such activity.”
AT&T’s proposed technology would help it define which Internet traffic is “permissible” and “non-permissible” on its network. This is exactly the scenario that supporters of Net Neutrality (read: everyone but the Internet service providers and their friends in Congress) have feared. In fact, a company like AT&T defining what kind of data is and isn’t permitted on its network is the very opposite of Net Neutrality.
But now that a court has thrown out the Federal Communications Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, this is our reality. If AT&T launched a product based on this patent — and given its history of anti-consumer behavior, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t — it would be able to “check” our data to see if we have the appropriate “user subscription” needed to download specific kinds of content.
Welcome to the cable-ized Internet, where for a fee you can “subscribe” to different channels and websites rather than being able to access all of them. The implications for privacy, copyright, free speech and social justice are overwhelming — and depressing.
This is the Internet as AT&T wants it: a network surveilled by the company that delivers access to it, where every move is under scrutiny. Are you watching the wrong videos? Saying the wrong things to the wrong people? Using the wrong devices to get online? Looks like the data you’re transmitting is “non-permissible” according to your current “subscription” and we’re going to disconnect you or, worse, turn you over to the authorities.
We’ve lost the legal protections that once guaranteed our right to connect and communicate freely. Only the FCC can restore this protection and save us from AT&T’s greedy designs. If the agencyclassifies broadband as a communications service and passes strong, long-lasting Net Neutrality rules, all of this will go away.
So if you haven’t already, tell the FCC to save the Internet from ridiculous patents like this. We have the right to access what we want, when we want, without ever asking permission.
Source: Freepress
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