AT & T disconnects entire families from the Internet because someone in their home is accused of copyright infringement / Boing Boing

It's been five years since the highly concentrated US telecoms sector announced its "Voluntary AKA Six Strikes", a system that stipulated that if a member of your household was accused of six acts of copyright infringement, everyone at home get the death penalty on the Internet, with the termination of your Internet connection.

The years of inaction that followed the promulgation of the policy prompted many of us to think that telecommunication operators and cable companies thought they preferred to play the roles of judge, jury and hangman for the future. access to the Internet, but over the years, the sector has become more concentrated, and what was unthinkable in the past is now the reality.

This year, AT & T was allowed to buy Time-Warner, creating a second Big Doc / Big Media fantasy (the other being Comcast / Universal), whose priorities are now shared between providing access and remove it (to compare with what happened when Sony bought Columbia and went from a company that offered new ways to listen to music to a company whose mission was to restrict the how you were listening to music).

AT & T has now begun to disconnect customers accused of counterfeiting, that is, accused of watching television or listening to music suboptimally for shareholders of media companies.

Customers who are disconnected have never been able to face their accusers or have a day in court. The people they live with are not charged all mischief. The internet they lose is probably the only option they have for broadband – or one of two options, the other being probably a cable company like Comcast, which could now join AT & T in a race to conquer.

Internet is not a video on demand service, it is the nervous system of the 21st century. Terminating someone on the Internet puts an end to their access to family, education, employment, civic and political engagement, health care information and virtually everything we use to determine if a society is working well for its citizens.

The concentration of telecommunication networks is a disaster for the information society: from excessive prices to slowdowns in the deployment of fiber optics through censorship, violations of the neutrality of the Internet and disconnection, the creation of a concentrated and monopolized market in the most fundamental part of our lives in the 21st century terrible, terrible idea.

When we reverse the trend, we must not only regulate telecom operators, but also dissociate them. Cut them into pieces so small that they can no longer lobby to ban municipal broadband, that they can not spy on entire populations, so small that they can not afford to Disconnect their clients on behalf of inexplicable and unnamed rights holders who are not subject to any penalty. for false accusations or negligent accounting.

In a statement to Axios, AT & T stated that content owners – television networks, music advocacy groups or other groups involved in the production – had been notified by AT & T when they had proof that an Internet connection controlled by the telecommunication company illegally shared content protected by copyright. .

"Based on the notifications we received, we identified the customer on the account and shared with him the information we received.We also contacted the client to inform him of the violation of the right of withdrawal. author and offer him assistance to prevent the continuation of the activity, "said a spokesman for AT & T.

"A small number of customers who continue to receive new copyright infringement notices from content owners despite our efforts to educate them, will see their service interrupted."

Scoop: AT & T will cut the service of some customers in the crackdown on piracy [Sara Fischer and David McCabe/Axios]

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