The National Journal’s Drew Clark had this item earlier this week regarding the curiously muted position of Hollywood on net neutrality. Although Hollywood has a huge stake in whether broadband providers gain leverage in prioritizing and potentially discriminating against content and applications that ride over the broadband pipelines, most of the studios aren’t saying much.
Warner Brothers and Disney have come out against net neutrality regulations (Warner Brothers is owned by Time Warner Inc., which also owns the nation’s second largest cable operations), while Sony has come out in favor of net neutrality regulations. News Corp., which owns Fox, is “studying” the issue, while Paramount and Universal are quiet about the controversy. The MPAA has “other legislative priorities.”
Despite the potential harm that a two-tiered Internet might cause the studios, part of Hollywood’s ambivalence may stem from its experience with government regulations affecting the economic relationships among content suppliers and distributors. The studios spent almost two decades trying to eliminate rules, the financial interest and syndication rules, that hampered their ability to own TV programming, and know full well that regulations once implemented can go off in crazy, deleterious directions.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:55 PM|Comments(0)
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