It's starting to look a lot like China:

DRM on music may be dying, but network filtering of copyrighted material is alive and well. In fact, over the next few months, two different filtering initiatives from Big Content could both come to fruition, bringing the magic of Big Brother to colleges and ISPs near you. It's still a contested issue, but the situation has developed to the point where it is at least plausible to imagine ubiquitous network filtering in the US.

Once the telcos (and Universities!) start monitoring and filtering traffic, where does it stop? Should we also filter for "hate speech" and un-American activities? Disturbing stuff...

Update: It turns out that the original article is somewhat alarmist. As an update states:

"Neither of these two provisions is tied to a school's participation in the federal student aid programs in any way," we're told. "In other words, no school and no student will ever lose funding if a school doesn't make plans to address IP theft, or purchase any programs to do it. And no school will ever lose any federal aid because its students engage in illegal downloading or file-sharing, period."

So the RIAA can sue schools, but not jeopardize their federal funds.

I also looked at the RIAA's "university toolkit" monitoring application, and all it does is naive traffic monitoring, not content filtering. The documentation includes this laughable sentence: "The program cannot distinguish between legal and illegal activity and does not identify the titles of the files being passed across the network." So while they may be more aggressive in the future, they really have no idea what they're doing now.