MPAA lobbies Obama for Internet filtering

An expensive idea and doomed to fail.

THE MOVIE MAFIAA is lobbying US President-Elect Obama's transition team to make Internet filtering a priority in the next administration to block illegal file-sharing of films and television shows. If that proceeds, it will be a costly boondoggle that won't even work.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the litigation and lobbying arm of the Hollywood motion picture studios and the US television oligopoly, posted a position paper (PDF) on Obama's transition website, change.gov, exhorting the incoming administration that it is "imperative to curb the theft of online content."

In its paper, the MPAA urges the importance of "the fight against online piracy, including through automated detection and removal of infringing content."

Hollywood might well find sympathetic ears in the new administration.
Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden has represented Delaware in the US Senate for many years. Delaware is a small state that domiciles many US companies because its laws are slanted to favour the interests of corporations against those of shareholders, consumers and the public. As Senator, Biden shilled enthusiastically for the Big Media interests by drafting, sponsoring and voting for a raft of legislation that was lobbied for by the large media corporations. Biden also supported the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping and Internet surveillance as well as retroactive amnesty for the telecoms that perform it.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has also signalled in the past year that it might be amenable to considering adopting regulations mandating or facilitating network traffic filtering by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
For their part, the large ISPs, many of which are telecoms and cable companies, would like nothing better than to break down the Network Neutrality doctrine that has enabled the Internet's rapid development and meteoric growth. They would like to impose tiered networks - similar to traditional broadcast and cable television business models - in order to monetise Internet traffic every way they possibly might, by charging content providers, advertisers and subscribers for access and traffic. They view Internet filtering as a wedge to provide them with the technology and regulations to overthrow Network Neutrality.

Furthermore, the large ISPs would likely welcome mandated Internet filtering, because they believe that either the federal government or subscribers would have to pay for the additional infrastructure that filtering would require. They would also like to throttle the rate of growth in network traffic volume - much of which is driven by the ever-widening adoption of media streaming and P2P file-sharing activity - that is forcing them to make larger investments in networking infrastructure to support, squeezing their profitability.