ISPs Interested in Becoming Net Cops
As piracy booms all over the Internet, are Internet Service Providers the key to stopping this activity? Considering that ISPs are supposedly seen as an open highway for anyone to traverse through, how would users feel when they suddenly encounter an ISP traffic cop?
There was a taste of this case last year when ComCast was accused by their customers of allegedly limiting Bit torrent downloads. What more, if this suddenly becomes the norm? It seems that the industry leaders at the Consumer Electronics Show were interested.
Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.
“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”
What does 2008 hold for the Internet and its denizens? Only time will tell.