Net Neutrality Blasted by MPAA Bosses

proudhawk writes "The LA Times is reporting that the MPAA's Dan Glickman has taken another swipe against net neutrality at his recent ShoWest appearance. '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.'"

FUD begets FUD

[Meor]

Both sides of this story are lying about their intentions. Extra regulation will not make the net more neutral. Only removing the tools of power used by governments to regulate the internet at all, will make it neutral.

Changing The Distribution Game

[Chabil Ha']

What we have here is an organization that is losing in the distribution game. It used to be that casual piracy wasn't a big deal because it was inconvenient to try and copy a VHS tape. Now, it is super easy to duplicate *and* distribute it over the net.

So, instead of changing their business model where they can return the distribution power back their way *by adapting*, they're trying to inhibit or restrict the convenience of a high speed network. When are these people going to get a clue?

In the book Good To Great [amazon.com], Jim Collins points out one of the fundamental things that great companies have to do: the have to have the courage to face reality. The longer they ignore it, the more difficult it will be for them to turn things around. Some may say it's too late (I disagree), but they need a real culture change to transform.

Re:that may be true, but...

[Tetsujin]

It won't matter. If Obama wins the democratic nomination, then both presidential candidates will be pro-net-neutrality. There just isn't a popular platform for "yes, let's cripple the Internet so that corporations can profit more," and for once politicians have realized it.

Well, over the years presidential candidates have learned a few interesting tricks. For instance, a candidate could potentially say they're going to do something, and then, once elected, do something else. Or, they could actually say what they're going to do, but say it in such a way that people don't catch on that it's not what they want. For instance, consider the following possible statement. The figures in it are fictitious, of course...

"Presently there's a conflict going on with regard to how the internet is managed. Service providers are overwhelmed with the level of traffic they receive, and over 80% of that traffic is being generated by less than 20% of their clients. This results in slower connections for the rest of their clients. I support legislation that would allow these providers to manage their services in such a way as to ensure a good experience for all their clients."

That's the trick - not everybody is a filesharer, and not everybody has actually started using the internet in a way that demands the full speed of their connection. Appeal to the clueless majority - tell them that filesharing results in them getting lower speeds (never mind the fact that it's their service provider's responsibility to provide the speed they've promised, or the fact that many of these users aren't likely to notice the difference anyway) and... voila. Public support for throwing a bone to ISPs.

Ok, let's do some hacktivism

[jollyreaper]

If these guys are going to fuck with our internet and our culture, let's start fucking back. Which porn sites are they signed up on, preferred escort services, dealers, pimps, etc. Turn over their biggest rocks and expose the filth and muck to the light of day. Let the story change from "Why we need to destroy the net" to "Gee, honey, I didn't mean for you to find out about that tranny fetish of mine."

Remove what regulation?

[tepples]

"Municipalities" "Regulate" cable layers and create all these other broad-sweeping ancillary problems.

You're right though, remove the regulation, remove the monopoly.

Remove the regulation that allows for easements for public utilities, and providers won't be able to pull their wires over or under non-subscribers' land.

Decreasing bandwith goes hand in hand with filter.

[gnutoo]

You must have slept through the whole P2P block attack and congressional response. Bandwith is worthless if it can't be used the way you want.

The Collaps of At Home and DSL providers that has lead to the sad current state also saw a decrease in bandwith. The entertainment and telco dominated companies immediately established caps and port blocks.

That pushes the trend you are looking for back about nine years. In that time you have gotten some very minor improvements that far outweigh the restrictions put in place. The US has sank to 26th place in the world for network availability and international watchdogs rate the US as a chronic surveillance state.

"Light regulation" has provided the worst of all worlds. Both real regulation and real freedom would have provided fiber to the house by now, as it has elsewhere. Fake regulation has given you fake bandwith that mostly works to put money into MAFIAA pockets. Look for fake regulations to give you all of the freedom of broadcast TV in the near future.

Re:DRM failed, so change strategy

[glindsey]

This is why I'd love to see us make inroads on cheap, easy to use wireless mesh routers. A bunch of them in a municipality could automatically mesh together. In theory, enough of them could create a network large enough that they wouldn't even need to tie into the Internet -- they'd have become their own network.

The difficulties of such a mesh are mind-boggling, of course. I'm sure getting an efficient routing system down would be a total nightmare. With a decentralized system like that, I don't know how you'd index or search for information (the exact same problem FreeNet has had). Efficiency and speed will degrade proportionally to geographic distance (number of nodes your data has to hop through). And unless you had a ton of nodes, you're going to get splits in the mesh if a single node happens to connect two disparate meshes and it goes down.

It's definitely a utopian libertarian dream, but it is one that has always fascinated me. A completely democratic network, totally decentralized and controlled by the users. And so I'm sure we'll never see it (and it would never work in reality anyway, similar to how communism breaks down in the real world).

Re:DRM failed, so change strategy

[jc42]

This is why I'd love to see us make inroads on cheap, easy to use wireless mesh routers. ... The difficulties of such a mesh are mind-boggling, of course. ... It's definitely a utopian libertarian dream, but it is one that has always fascinated me.

Funny, but it's not just utopian libertarians with such dreams. If you dig up the docs from the earliest days of the ARPAnet, back in the 1960s, you'll find that the US Dept of Defense had exactly the same dream. Except theirs was a battle field scenario, with all of their mobile equipment and soldiers connected via a wireless network. That network shouldn't have any central routers, because those are instant targets, and taking them out kills your network. The idea was that all the equipment supported dynamic routing, with all but the endpoints doing routing, and if any of the routers were taken out, the rest would instantly reconfigure the routing tables. The idea was that as long as an electronic path between two nodes exists, those nodes can communciate.

This was how the Internet was supposed to work. The wired version was an interim kludge for development purposes, to be phased out as wireless equipment became available. Central routine nodes and organizations like ISPs that are chokepoints were allowed because the routing protocols hadn't been worked out yet, but eventually they should be supplanted by a fully distributed routing system with maximal interconnection, so that an enemy couldn't take it all down with a few well-placed shots.

Somehow the commercial Internet didn't see it that way. They much prefer minimal hardware with tree-structured, heirarchical connectivity, and chokepoints everywhere, without alternate routes to handle failure.

(OTOH, the new OLPC XO implements something very similar to what the DoD proposed 40 years ago. There's some sort of historical irony here, with people building a computer for young children doing something that the entire commercial economy has failed to deliver for decades. Maybe the children will lead us into this libertarian/military utopia that we've dreamed of. ;-)