It's no secret that US content owners want the "middlemen" of the Internet economy to better police their networks and services for material that infringes copyright. The problem, from a legal perspective, is that ISPs like AT&T and Comcast and content hosts like YouTube have the explicit legal go-ahead not to do this; they operate in a tranquil Caribbean "safe harbor" that exempts them from the crushing responsibility to filter and analyze every bit of content passing through their control.

But some companies have expressed interest in doing such filtering voluntarily, and MPAA boss Dan Glickman praised them for it at a conference in Washington yesterday. "Their revenue bases depend on legitimate operations of their networks and more and more they're finding their networks crowded with infringed material, bandwidth space being crowded out," Glickman said."Many of them are actually getting into the content business directly or indirectly. This is not an us-versus-them issue."

He went on to say that the movie business wants to "deepen our relationship" with ISPs.

NBC Universal has been one of the big drivers behind this push to outsource the work of filtering to the ISPs. NBC's general counsel Rick Cotton recently told the FCC that ISPs should be forced to "use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content." Otherwise, corn farmers could be harmed.

An exec at GE, which owns NBC Universal, later praised the idea in a keynote speech to the telecommunications industry and indicated that his company was quite serious about it.

Rather amazingly, given the money and time that will be required to implement such a system, AT&T has agreed to start filtering content at some mysterious point in the future. Other ISPs could well follow suit, as most of the major networks are owned by or affiliated with companies that also have a voracious need for content (just think of how both cable companies and telcos like AT&T and Verizon need access to channels for their various TV offerings, if you need an example). The companies want to keep on good terms with content owners, but there may also be some legitimate concern about the impact illicit traffic has on their networks. Cracking down on illegal file-sharing—should that prove to be technically possible—could help with both of these issues.

Net neutrality rules, if passed, might throw up some roadblocks. It's no wonder, then, that NBC and the MPAA as a whole are opposed to such rules.