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Rabble.ca is reporting that lately some Internet providers are taking the perverse position that they want to start inserting screens, filters, barriers and gates into the system. They want to start sniffing at that YouTube video to see if it contains copyright material. They want to play content cops.

News of this odd about face first showed up at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). According to The New York Times, during a discussion at NBC’s booth at the trade fair, James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T said his company has been “talking to technology companies, and members of the M.P.A.A. and R.I.A.A., for the last six months about carrying out digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.”

That means looking inside data packets that pass through the AT&T systems in search of material that contravenes U.S. intellectual property laws. That means spying on you. Not that AT&T is totally averse to helping out with spying. It’s already shown its willingness to help the N.S.A. keep tabs on Americans’ phone calls, but this is a different level of craziness. So, why is AT&T opening itself up to consumer backlash and potential litigation? Because it has concluded that digital rights management (DRM) at the file level has failed to prevent file sharing of copyright materials like movies and music. And carriers in the U.S. (and as we’ll see, in Canada too) want to stop that sharing. Why? Two reasons.

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Millions of AT&T DSL subscribers and Starbucks customers soon will get free Wi-Fi access at 7,000 Starbucks locations as part of new deal.

AT&T, the largest provider of broadband in the country, will replace T-Mobile as the hotspot provider for Starbucks. The deal expands an existing partnership, which involved AT&T providing back-end support for services such as connecting Starbucks registers.

Under the agreement, about 12 million AT&T subscribers who take DSL service at the 1.5-megabit-per-second tier or higher will receive free Wi-Fi access at Starbucks stores. Users will log on with their AT&T Yahoo DSL sign-in to receive service.

T-Mobile customers still will be able to log on to the network through a partnership with AT&T.

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Leeds-based internet service provider 186K has switched its customer support from India back to the UK to improve its response times and service levels.

Dominic Marrocco, owner of 186K, said, “We are very excited about our new end-user customer support. It will prove to be vital for our new converged product ranges coming out in 2008.”

Marrocco said the market was evolving, with rapid support services becoming the most important factor.

All of 186K’s end-user brands will benefit from the new UK customer support.

The Register is reporting that Tiscali, the UK’s fourth largest broadband provider, implemented a “three strikes” arrangement with the record industry to disconnect illegal filesharers last summer but that relations between the pair are in disarray as they battle over who should cover the costs of sending warning letters to peer to peer users and then disconnect persistent copyright infringers.

The system the two-million-customer ISP believed it had agreed to with the BPI is the same one that the government is pushing all ISPs to enforce.

It had been thought that the dialogue between the BPI and Tiscali would serve as a model for the rest of the internet industry, which is threatened with legislation if it does not come to a voluntary agreement to act against copyright infringement. The issue hit the mainstream at the beginning of this week, when leaked documents confirmed Westminster’s plans to bring in new laws.

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The Australian Government has a comprehensive cyber-safety plan that includes the implementation of mandatory ISP-based filtering to deliver a filtered feed to all homes, schools and public internet points.Mr Conroy said the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would examine all aspects of ISP-level filtering, with a laboratory trial completed by the end of June 2008, followed by a pilot test in a real world environment.

Not everyone is happy about it though. The Opposition said “Proper supervision should be front and centre of any efforts to protect children from inappropriate material on the internet; supported by additional tools such as content filters, not some mandatory and ill-conceived ‘clean feed’ measure by a government that believes only it has the authority to decide what’s appropriate or inappropriate content for computer users.”

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