Content owners are in a curious position: though certainly not wanting to put themselves in a place where they are at the mercy of their distributors (increasingly, ISPs), TV and movie companies continue to oppose network neutrality. The reason isn't hard to find, either. The big content companies are generally more interested in convincing ISPs to filter P2P traffic for copyright violations than they are in worrying about how non-neutral ISPs could hold up the stagecoach in the future. This week, the MPAA's Dan Glickman made the movie business' position clear: network neutrality is worse even than a Uwe Boll flick.

At the industry's ShoWest conference, Glickman gave a passionate speech about the need to stomp out online piracy... after opening by talking up 2007's record-setting box office numbers. (Fun fact: one of Glickman's favorite movies last year was The Bourne Ultimatum, which "blew my mind... then almost blew out my knee when I tried to copy some of the moves.)

In his view, network neutrality is nothing more than a code word for "government regulation," which is of course a bad thing unless the government is regulating your copyright terms upward. The big reason for the MPAA's opposition to neutrality is the group's fear that neutrality rules could prevent ISPs from installing deep packet inspection gear that would attempt to filter the downloading of copyrighted content.



Just say no to regulation

As our recent chat with NBC's top lawyer showed, content owners are deeply committed to this idea, going so far as to write lengthy FCC filings on the importance of allowing ISPs to block, shape, filter, and degrade traffic. As that conversation also showed, though, content owners are increasingly turning to P2P as a way to handle the huge traffic loads associated with serving content, a need that will grow more acute as hi-def streams and downloads become the norm in future years.

The movie business also needs to ensure that consumers have good access to its digital products and that ISPs can't start blocking legal downloads or throttling streaming video unless the content owners pay up. Apparently, though, ISP filtering trumps concerns about ISP extortion, at least for now, and the MPAA has been calling for voluntary filtering for months.

In his speech, Glickman said that "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."

The LA Times' points out that the current Markey/Pickering bill on network neutrality only sanctions access to "lawful content," and so might not pose a threat to filtering anyway. From an ISP perspective, though, there's little appetite for this sort of filtering, since interfering so directly with the content flowing over a network has the potential to remove the "safe harbor" protections that ISPs now enjoy.

But there's a spectre haunting the MPAA, and that spectre is piracy. It trumps all other concerns. Illicit file-swapping is going on today, and Glickman wants it stopped at whatever future cost to his own industry (those battles can always be fought later). "I don't think movie theaters should be asked by our government to compete with piracy," he said. "I don't think that should be the policy of our country."

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