AT&T executive James Cicconi, senior vice president of external & legal affairs must not read the news before opening their mouths. The New York Times Bits Blog is reporting this morning that representatives at CES have openly stated today "that they may start filtering Internet content."

Brilliant move, considering that news just broke yesterday that Comcast could receive FCC fines as high as $1.77 trillion. Obviously, filtering traffic to prevent your users from utilizing certain protocols or services is a form of non-Network Neutral behavior, and AT&T purports to be plodding down the path towards making that a reality for their millions of broadband users.

AT&T doesn't seem interested in only ending the use of BitTorrent or other P2P clients. They're also actively investigating the usage of digital fingerprinting to filter out other website's usage of what the system deems as copyrighted material. They're currently in close talks with NBC-Universal over what the best software package would be to use.

Does this mean that all our digital video will only come from Hulu? I was wondering how they were going to end up making that system usable. They're simply going to filter the rest of the internet around it! Your DSL connection is only useful now for connecting to Hulu!

He added, in later comment, that “..whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it.” No kidding, genius.