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MPAA steps up the rhetoric on Net neutrality - March 11, 2008

When the issue of Net neutrality first began to surface a few years ago, the major studios mostly ducked the matter, uncertain as to whether they even had a dog in the fight. Over time, as they began to focus on the possibility of filtering unlicensed copyrighted content from digital networks, they gradually developed a position of opposing anything that might jeopardize those hopes. But they confined their public comments largely to general exhortations to regulators to be cautious in applying any neutrality requirements.

At the ShoWest theater-owners conference on Tuesday, however, they cranked up the anti-Net neutrality rhetoric by at least a notch, maybe a notch and a half.

"No one here needs a lecture on what happens when one illegal copy [of a movie] makes its way to the Internet," MPAA CEO Dan Glickman said in his keynote address. "Today, new tools are emerging that allow us to work with Internet Service Providers to prevent this illegal activity. And, new efforts are emerging in Washington to stop this essential progress."

Although the comments came toward the end of the speech, after Glickman had gone through the generally good news on the state of the theatrical business, they represented the MPAA's sharpest critique yet of the push for mandated Net neutrality:

This effort is being called by its proponents “net neutrality.” It’s a clever name. But at the end of the day, there’s nothing neutral about this for our customers or for our ability to make great movies—blockbuster first-run films—in the future. If Washington had truth in labeling, we’d call this proposal by another name: Government regulation of the Internet.

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, of course, is a problem for all of us. We all know that our business is changing today. Very few films make their money back at the theater. Some estimate as low as ten percent. So our ability to keep producing high-quality movies for your theaters hinges in no small part on the success of legal outlets for the after theater experience.

[snip]
Technology increasingly is making new worlds of consumer-centric innovation possible, and it is handing us the opportunity to deal the first real body blow to online piracy, to begin to reach toward the day when we might be able to take it off the table and debug the system. It simply cannot be the policy of this country to say no to that.

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.

Why so hot and bothered now? Presumably because the MPAA is concerned about the growing momentum in Washington behind some sort of government action on Net neutrality. On the same day Glickman spoke, the House Judiciary Committee's Anti-Trust Task Force held a hearing on Net neutrality and the First Amendment, with a witness list pretty heavily stacked in favor of neutrality supporters, generally a good indication of where a committee chair's sympathies lie. Although the Judiciary Committee is not currently considering a Net neutrality bill, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) has one working over in the Energy and Commerce Committee, which the studios oppose. Whenever you get multiple committees trying to get a piece of the action it's a sign that lawmakers smell a winner.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin, meanwhile, has made it pretty clear he plans to come down on Comcast over its throttling of BitTorrent traffic, the only questions are how hard and on what scope. Chances are it will be pretty hard and wide ranging in an effort to demonstrate that the FCC can police with the issue without Congressional intervention.

Either way, the MPAA does not appear to be standing on very friendly ground in Washington with respect to its filtering hopes.


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