Making sense of the MPAA's latest retro take on tech

MPAA Dan Glickman: Nyet on Net neutrality

(Credit: Declan McCullagh)

Dan Glickman, who runs Hollywood's most powerful trade organization, has got to start watching something hipper than It's a Wonderful Life.

The MPAA's senior honcho is an experienced and capable lawyer, but is Glickman's nostalgia for the pre-Internet era clouding his judgment about the movie industry's future? Glickman delivered a speech (PDF) on Monday to the annual ShoWest convention in Las Vegas and it was a corker. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today.

This is a high-stakes debate. Do we take a stand for intellectual property rights or cast them aside in the digital environment? Are we permitted to respond to consumers, innovate on their behalf, and compete with the world? Or are we told by our government to stand down? Today MPAA and all of our studios are standing up in opposition to broad-based government regulation of the Internet. We are opposing so-called "Net neutrality" government action. And, in the process, we are standing up for our customers, for our economy, and for the ability of content producers to continue to create great movies for the future.

(Stage instructions: Slow fade out to the background theme of a Lawrence Welk polka, as Zuzu petals sprinkle across the Capitol Dome.)

Now, back to the real world.

Don't believe for a minute that Glickman's as clueless as that speech might suggest. He was a United States Congressman for Kansas' 4th district from 1977 until 1995. Then he served as Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton. He's been running the MPAA since succeeding Jack Valenti in 2004. He knows his way around the corridors of power and how legislation gets passed in Washington. Glick's doing what a smart hired hand representing any powerful interest group does: he's exaggerating for effect.

But here's my rule of thumb: When you find a collection of billion-dollar interests--in this case content companies, cable operators, and telcos--lining up on one side of the issue, you know the fix is in. Glickman is purposely demonizing the import of the Net neutrality bill proposed by Reps. Ed Markey and Chip Pickering and now waiting in the queue before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Read the proposal for yourself, but the attacks are over the top. I wonder whether Glickman would toe the same line if Hollywood was making serious money from Internet downloads (and that day inevitably will arrive.) Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jon Healey fills in the picture:

Yet Hollywood's vision is focused on the near-term risk of piracy, rather than the long-term risk of its distribution pipelines deciding to collect extra tolls. Glickman argued in his speech that neutrality regulations would bar the use of emerging tools that ISPs can use to prevent piracy. That's what some studio lobbyists have been telling lawmakers, too, in their efforts to derail neutrality legislation. And depending on how the regulations are written, they could be right.

But the bill that's awaiting action in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, by (Markey and Pickering) doesn't fit that description. It would make it U.S. policy to preserve the public's access to "lawful" content, applications, and services online, carving out wide latitude for ISPs to interfere with infringing works. For example, ISPs couldn't block all BitTorrent traffic simply because it might be used for piracy, but they could use video fingerprints to try to stop BitTorrent from being used to deliver bootlegged movies.

Sounds mild enough, though I'm sure Comcast might have a problem with that. I'm not sure that most of the rest of us would mind so much.

[Dalkorian]

This is simple - the evil known as the RIAA/MPAA is against net neutrality. Therefore net neutrality is what is best for the consumer. Period.

Or we could allow ISP's like concast (misspelled in purpose) to dictate what we are and are not allowed to do with the connection we're paying them for. We could allow concast to decide that BitTorrent is not to be used ... we could allow concast to throttle YouTube as well (since that directly competes with their crappy TV lineup). We could be just like communist china, or nazi germany back in the 30's and 40's, where censorship is expected and the public has no rights whatsoever.

Is that what America really wants??

[Leria]

In some cases..... unfortunately that is what America wants. I have actually heard some normally smart people saying that should be the norm, that an ISP can filter if something competes with their offerings.... which is a crock, but some of these people are 'true believers' that it would cut down on piracy (which is not as big of a loss maker as software makers imply).

[t8]

Yes

[harscoet]

But yet it is true that the vast majority of the BitTorrent traffic is pirate content, noone can dispute that.
So though I see that it would be unfair for the tiny amount of P2P traffic that may be legal, why should ISPs pay the cost of the huge bandwith increase caused by this illegal traffic ?
When the same thing happened with spam, everybody agreed that ISP shouldn't pay for the bandwith and should block it, why not with pirated stuff I wonder. Oh I know, everybody hates spam but many like 'free' pirate content ...

Since when blocking illegal content has become a bad thing ?

[justdenny]

If you think that only BitTorrent, other P2P, or "illegal" content will be blocked, and that will be the only ramifications of this battle, you are in for a very, very big surprise when Net neutrality becomes a thing of the past.

[tallmanscomplex]

This whole "net neutrality" thing is a crock. Why shouldn't ISPs have the right to do what they want with the networks that they spend big money on to build and maintain. Just because somebody pays more for a "higher tier" of service doesn't mean that I will get terrible service. When UPS started offering overnight delivery, they did not degrade their ground shipping service. History tells us that generally speaking, the more the government regulation on something, the more expensive and less innovative it becomes. Read this:

http://capmag.com/article.asp?id=5125

[BCF1968]

You're crazy, these companies that get charged for "higher tier" of service WILL hurt you. Where do you think the money is going to come from to pay this extra expense? YOU the consumer. Do you think these companies are just going to eat the extra costs? HAHAHA! The fact is EVERY website already pays for bandwidth. Why people are still ignorant of this I'm not sure. Now you want them to pay TWICE?

[timothywmurray]

While I am totally for net neutrality legislation such as what is currently proposed... Well I'm just confused as to who could possibly be against it. The Studios will make more money because there will be less friction in the distribution content. The cable companies will make more money because they will develop service options to bill per amount of bandwidth used (which is totally different from selective filtering of content). The end users will be better off, The advertisers will have more and more targeted channels to use. Even the politicians will benefit because they will have more stakeholder giving them graft. The only losers are industries whose revenue streams depend on distributing drivel that not many people want (at least not many with he money advertisers are targeting) . That would include the RIAA and the MPAA

[JadedGamer]

Basically, not having Net Neutrality opens the floodgates for what is essentially a "protection money" racket, where an ISP can choose to effectively downgrade connections to content providers who do not pay them a fee. Is it really in MPAA's interest that e.g. (free) trailers for movies will not be available in full quality to customers unless movie companies pay a "badwidth fee" to a multitude of ISPs? And in the case of P2P there isn't one content provider but thousands...

Also, ISPs opposing Net Neutrality need to look at what makes their customers their customers: Yes, the transfer of (popular) content is expensive, but wiithout that content they would not have any customers in the first place because that's what people get internet access for.