The new so-called Copyright Alert System was created by a coalition of major film studios, record labels and Internet-service providers, who agreed to guidelines for identifying and notifying Web users who violate copyrights.

Among the ISPs that have pledged to implement the new policy are Comcast Corp., AT&T Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.

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McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee’s Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own, according to interviews with people working at or with ISPs in the region.

A regulator in Bahrain, which uses McAfee’s SmartFilter product, says the government is planning to switch soon to technology from U.S.-based Palo Alto Networks Inc. It promises to give Bahrain more blocking options and make it harder for people to circumvent censoring.

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Botnets like Rustock use malicious code to string together hundreds of thousands of personal computers that are then used to send spam email without knowledge of their owners. In the case of Rustock, infected computers were managed by a fleet of 26 separate “command and control” servers that sent them instructions.

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It’s a question that nags the tech industry with almost every new advancement. But experts say the pitch for faster, more tricked-out technology has reached a new peak.

Here, in four categories, is what you need–and what you don’t.

Broadband. Most Internet service providers now offer different levels of high-speed connectivity. If you want to stream TV shows or movies, play games or download big files, you may need more juice. Ditto if you have an entire household that’s trying to get online after dinner. Before you change plans, however, make sure you’re actually getting the speed that your provider promised. You can assess the speed of your current connection via a free test website such as Speakeasy.net or Speedtest.net.

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Should free and open communication—particularly free and open communication via the Internet—be considered an unalienable right? How much control should a government or Internet service provider wield over its citizens’ communications?

This is very much a global issue and, while it’s easy to say that every citizen should have “uncensored access” to the Internet, such a statement is too glib, and here’s why.

If we have learned anything in Internet security from the past 10 years, it’s that a completely open Internet can make it as difficult to communicate safely and effectively as a closed one. The past decade witnessed a meteoric rise of unwanted traffic in the form of spam and cybercrime, made possible through cheap and easy Internet connections. Should spammers engaged in mass-marketing (as well as other more nefarious activities) be able to communicate as freely and easily as Egyptian protestors? Where do we draw that line?

Second, while censorship is prominent in countries like Egypt and China, Americans face more subtle—but equally serious—concerns about the quality of our network access, with issues ranging from network neutrality to competition in access networks. Our government’s decisions affect our Internet access quality and speed. Six years ago the Supreme Court decided Internet service providers (ISPs) were under no obligation to lease their infrastructure to competing carriers. This has effectively created a near-monopoly for Internet access in many regions of the United States and left users either unable to exchange certain types of traffic (such as when Comcast blocked BitTorrent) or with flagging Internet speeds (such as when AT&T delayed its rollout of fiber to the home as part of its U-Verse offering).

Finally, even if citizens can access the Internet, they must also be able to verify information sources. It’s not just whether Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is blocked—it’s whether governments or other organizations are using such sites to spread propaganda.

All of these issues, both at home and abroad, revolve around one question: Who should be the Internet gatekeeper, and what rules should be applied at the gate? I believe the foundations of rights in the digital world rest on two pillars: transparency and choice. First, the actions of ISPs and governments should be transparent; if they take certain actions to restrict, throttle or otherwise manipulate communications or information, users must know about it. Second, users must be able to choose their ISP. If they do not like the performance or policies of a particular ISP, they should have the ability to switch providers.

Transparency is thornier than it appears. Because ISPs do not publicize the way they prioritize different kinds of traffic, we must reverse-engineer these practices with measurement tools. Even notions such as “Internet speed” are complicated and can’t be represented by a single number. Also, different users may be concerned with different performance metrics; gamers might be interested in network service that delivers traffic with the least amount of delay, while those who stream movies may care more about receiving a high quality signal with few errors.

At Georgia Tech we are working with the FCC to give consumers a better sense of whether they’re getting what they are paying for, in terms of ISP performance, and also to educate them on how they might coax better performance out of their home networks.

But in the end, transparency is only helpful if users can choose among Internet service providers. Unfortunately in the United States, users have very little choice. We must reconsider ways to make the ISP market more competitive, perhaps drawing on our own experiences in forcing competition among utility providers.

Though the events in Egypt seem far away, the central questions about information access are quite relevant here at home. Demanding that the ISP policies and behaviors be transparent—and providing users more choice in the ISPs they can use—helps ensure that everyone’s Internet is less vulnerable to the whims of a single gatekeeper.

Nick Feamster is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In 2010 he was recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35 for his research in computer networks, and he also received a Rising Star Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Feamster is featured in the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine in a multi-page exploration of tomorrow’s Internet.

The restoration of communications comes a day after President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not seek another term as president in the forthcoming September election. Though that seems not to have satisfied the protesters who are eager that he step down right away.

Messages on @Speak2Tweet, the Twitter account created by Google and Twitter, have grown to 1,197 overnight, though with the Internet returning to normal that may stop.

The Internet may be returning to something resembling normal, but it’s clear that Egypt itself has quite a ways to go. I heard again this morning from my friend Abdalla in Cairo via text message. He wrote:

I am close to Tahrir Square. Pro-Mubarak rallies are taking place. They are not huge crowds but many of them are complete thugs. Thank goodness I got out of there with my camera in one piece. I am seeking refuge in a hotel lobby for now. I talked to a video journalist here who had his camera spray painted by someone in the crowd. Today is going to be a really ugly day :(

As the country braced for huge antigovernment protests on the traditional day of prayer, the government appeared to have unplugged most means of communication—including social network Facebook and Twitter—that activists had been using to coordinate action across the country. Landline calls placed from outside the country, however, were connecting.

Government-owned Telecom Egypt runs the country’s fixed-line network. Attempts to connect to the websites of several Egyptian ISPs, including EgyptWeb, TeData and Purenet all failed.

U.K.-headquartered Vodafone Group PLC said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been “instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.” It said the Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.

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Interesting PR campaign from Netflix, which is fighting with the cable guys and telcos over the cost of delivering all that streaming video to your living room: The company is going to publish a list of broadband Internet providers, ranked by performance.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s letter to shareholders goes on about his company’s position vs. the ISPs at great length, and I’ll reproduce it at the bottom of the post.

But you can summarize it in a sentence: If the broadband guys insist on gouging us to get video to our customers, we’re going to make a very public stink.

So tomorrow’s list is a warning shot, meant to give the ISPs a sense of where Netflix is willing to go on this one.

Hastings says the list will detail “which ISPs provide the best, most consistent high-speed Internet for streaming Netflix,” and offers a preview: Charter is tops, right now.

But if you invert Hastings’s description, you get what he really means: We’re going to tell some broadband customers that they’re getting screwed and should switch to a new provider. Heads up, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.

In other news, Netflix casually tossed off another very good quarter: The company added three million subscribers in the last three months of 2010, and says that a third of its new customers are choosing its new streaming-only plan. International expansion is still on the table for 2011 and is a major focus for Netflix going forward, Hastings said.

Here’s his warning/threat to the broadband business:

Recently the FCC adopted a version of net neutrality for wired networks in the U.S., and it’s a step in the right direction. The focus is on fair-play within an ISP’s network, but does not explicitly address entry into the ISP’s network.

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, nocharges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.

Conversely, this open, regional, no-charges model should disallow content providers like Netflix and ESPN3 from shutting off certain ISPs unless those ISPs pay the content provider. Hopefully, we can get broad voluntary agreement on this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model. Some ISPs already operate by this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model, but without any commitment to maintain it going forward.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish on our blog ongoing performance statistics about ISPs collected from our 20 million subscribers detailing which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix. We can tell you now, though, that for our subscribers streaming Netflix, Charter is the highest-performance ISP in the United States.

Recently, there was a report that at peak times Netflix subscribers in the U.S. were driving about 20% of peak downstream last-mile Internet traffic. This may or may not be accurate, but it should be noted that because we pay for the data to be delivered to regional ISP front doors, little of this traffic goes over the Internet or ISP backbone networks, thereby minimizing ISP costs, avoiding congestion, and improving performance for end-using consumers.

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-alarge-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber.

The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at a hearing Thursday that he will put his weight behind a “net neutrality” bill introduced by Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass, and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. The bill would prevent Internet service providers from blocking or prioritizing legal content on the Web.

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At a digital music panel in Nashville this week, executives from AT&T (T) and Comcast (CMCSA) created a furor by saying they were passing along warnings to customers that the RIAA says are illegally uploading music files onto the Internet.

Later, the companies tried to calm the outrage erupting in the blogosphere by harrumphing they weren’t cutting off Internet access to those people–or in the case of Cox (CXR), hardly ever cutting it off. AT&T said it wouldn’t cut off access without a court order.

So what is going on? For more than a year, the RIAA has been engaged in a major diplomatic effort to win over ISPs. “What we are trying to encourage ISPs to do is adopt some form of graduated response,” says Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman. “It is our position that people who are repeat offenders merit an account suspension or something like that.” He adds that any customer has a right to due process and should have the option to challenge the action if they think it is unjustified.

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After its official unveiling on Feb. 9, the e-book reader started shipping on Monday, and actually managed to grab much–but not all–of the hype that’s surrounded Twitter of late. The device has been met with much acclaim, though it’s by no means unanimous. Jeff Bezos made an appearance on “The Daily Show” Monday night to make his pitch to an as-yet unimpressed Jon Stewart. His main sell? “We’d make it cheaper if we could.” Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild, isn’t thrilled about the Kindle either, but his objection isn’t price–it’s that he believes the text-to-speech feature on the device threatens the audio book market. Rather than engaging in battle with the Guild, Amazon (AMZN) decided to modify the Kindle’s software to make text-to-speech optional. Meanwhile, the Hearst Corporation announced development of its own “Kindle Kopy” aimed at capturing the newspaper and magazine market. The Kindle 2 itself has been shipping for just a week and it’s already gotten some print media looking over its shoulder. It remains to be seen, though, whether it’ll earn the moniker of “iPod for books.” Walt Mossberg’s comprehensive review of the device this week provided a glimpse into its actual pros and cons and some insight into the Kindle hubbub from a hands-on perspective.

Elsewhere, much of the news this week was about reorganizations in the digital space. BoomTown covered the much-anticipated Yahoo (YHOO) reorg, which was sketched out by CEO Carol Bartz for employees first in a post to the company blog, then elaborated upon in not one, but two, internal memos. Even BoomTown’s attention began to wander there toward the end. Must’ve been something in the water this week, because Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL kicked in a little reorganization of its own–CEO Randy Falco announced that Maneesh Dhir, head of AOL International, would be leaving the company and returning to his entrepreneurial roots, and ad head Greg Coleman announced a reshuffling of his own group. Over at News Corp. (NWS), upon official announcement of President and COO Peter Chernin’s departure, CEO Rupert Murdoch alluded to a reorg sometime in the future, and an immediate commitment to “streamlining” the business.

In Mossberg’s Mailbox this week, Walt answered questions about transferring data to an iPhone, giving Vista a dedicated graphics card, and using TrueSwitch to transfer email accounts when switching ISPs. And in the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at the ways different mobile companies back up your data and give you access to it.

More next week.

Bad news, Internet music, movie and other content “sharers”: The content companies are trading their sue-’em-all strategy for one that leans on Internet service providers to help them fight their battles for them. This may ultimately be much more effective. Here’s how it will work, via The Wall Street Journal:

The [Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's trade group] said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones.”

The fact that the big labels are going to stop suing people who “share” their music via P2P services is the least interesting development here. That’s just the industry accepting that it lost a battle that ended years ago. In Q3 of this year, the volume of music swapped on via P2P increased 28 percent, says NPD.

More interesting is that Big Music thinks it has finally found an ally in the ISPs, who have traditionally been just fine with letting their subscribers swap all the music they wanted. It’s not clear what incentive they’ve offered to get the ISPs on board. And note that the WSJ doesn’t identify any ISPs that have actually signed on to this strategy. So this still may not be a done deal.

But the people who sell you Internet access–whether its the cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), or telcos like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T)–have already shown a general inclination to help content owners fight piracy. Or at least help them fight particular kinds of particularly egregious piracy.

They’ve been doing so by trying to limit, in various ways, your ability to swap lots of files with other people. Some of these strategies have been clumsier than others.

Last year Comcast tried “throttling” the connections of broadband subscribers using some file-sharing software–a ham-handed approach (particularly the lying about it) that earned them a wrist-slap from the FCC.

But other companies have been more upfront about telling subs that they reserve the right to cut off file-sharers. A different approach that many are contemplating: simply charging heavy file-sharers a lot of money.

Do the ISPs really care about the sanctity of copyright? Doubtful. But they do care about the cost of moving lots of data around–and those costs are only going to increase as consumers start consuming more and more video over the Web.

And at least in the case of Hollywood, they do care about keeping content creators somewhat mollified, since all of the ISPs want to make money by selling, renting, or just offering up Hollywood’s movies and TV shows to subscribers.

So I’ve always understood why Comcast was standing up for the likes of Sony’s (SNE) movie studio. But why is Comcast (or its peers) going to start working on behalf of Sony’s music group? I’m all ears.