Verizon to Hollywood: I Said, “No, no, no!”

When Hollywood approached Verizon to join in the fight against piracy, the company pulled an Amy Winehouse and said, “No, no, no.” The New York Times Bits Blog has a nice little interview up with Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive vice president for public affairs, in which he lays out why the company rejected the notion of monitoring its traffic.

Unlike AT&T, which has openly talked about technological solutions to piracy, and Comcast, which is being investigated for blocking BitTorrent traffic, Verizon is going its own way on this one.

Tauke lays out three reasons why Verizon is averse to keeping tabs on its traffic. First, he believes it’s a slippery slope — piracy one day, pornography the next. And as they say on The Wire, Verizon has no interest in playing po-lice. Second, if Verizon ever failed to block a copyrighted work, liability factors arise. And finally, there are those nagging privacy issues.

Check out the full piece for more good tidbits from Verizon on traffic shaping and scalability.

I understand that Tauke is with Verizon’s public affairs department, so he could be saying one thing as Verizon actually does another. But at least when it counted, Verizon said “no.”