Demand for video reshaping the Web

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has seized on the secrecy issue as well.

"The question is going to arise: Are they reasonable network practices?" Martin told an audience at a technology trade show in January. "When they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public."

Comcast has also drawn fire for imposing secret limits on how much its subscribers can download in a month, then cutting off subscribers who don't heed warnings. Its rationale is that it doesn't want to scare the vast majority of its customers, who get nowhere close to the limits. (User estimates and hints from the company puts the download caps somewhere around 100 gigabytes per month, equivalent to a dozen high-definition movies.) Other ISPs are also reported to have secret limits.

Breaking the code of silence, Time Warner Cable announced Jan. 16 that it would explicitly cap the monthly downloads available to new customers in Beaumont, Texas, as a test. Subscribers who go over their allotment will pay extra, much like a cell-phone subscriber who uses too many minutes in a month.

Public Knowledge, one of the consumer advocacy groups that complained about Comcast's practices, welcomed Time Warner Cable's test as an example of a move toward openness and a good alternative to aggressive traffic prioritization.

Meanwhile, Internet "power users" howled in outrage and fear that their Internet bills would go up. It's likely, however, that explicit download caps are something U.S. households will have to get used to: They're the rule rather than the exception overseas.

The most surprising tack on traffic management comes from AT&T. Even though ISPs aren't liable when their subscribers share copyright materials, it is considering examining Internet traffic to stop piracy.

"It's like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?" AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson asked the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January.

Perhaps incidentally, filtering copyright materials would rid AT&T's network of a large volume of traffic. Arbor Networks puts peer-to-peer file sharing at 37 percent of Internet traffic, and much of that is probably illegally transferred movies.

If AT&T does implement such a filter, it would cross another important line for an ISP: looking at the content its customers transmit. While some ISPs reserve the right to examine the content, the only publicly acknowledged use of that technology is to fulfill a wiretap order.

To use the mail analogy, AT&T's filter would be akin to opening letters to make sure they contain no photocopies of books.

"I think 2008 is going to be a very interesting year, because we have this confluence of things going on," Weinstein said. "ISPs are moving towards rapid implementation of these sorts of things, and yet we really still don't have a clear handle on what the government response could be or should be, or to what extent consumers are being squeezed or affected in negative ways."

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