• Red Herring, Thursday, June 14, 2007 11 AM

AT&T has flexed its Web censorship muscle in becoming the first major Internet service provider to take steps to block Internet piracy on its network. It's quite a surprising reversal for a company that has consistently maintained that the illegal downloading of copyrighted music and movies over its network is not its responsibility. Net Neutrality groups are no doubt preparing a response.

"What we're trying to do in our piracy initiative is to try to come up with a network-based solution," said AT&T head of external and legislative affairs Jim Cicconi, who dropped the bomb at a Digital Hollywood conference. Cicconi did not mention how AT&T would block copyrighted files, but said the company wouldn't start by blocking file-sharing sites. The decision comes after AT&T was asked to partner with both Viacom and the Motion Picture Association to help stamp out the problem. Cicconi said peer-to-peer file sharing sites not only raise the cost of DVD and CD sales, but clog the company's network.

Net Neutrality proponents like Google will be up in arms about the AT&T decision. Ever skeptical that big telecom would eventually censor their networks, MoveOn.org and Save the Internet will be wondering what's next. Web piracy is one thing, but what about the next bandwidth related censorship?

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