IP Democracy: NBC-U: Force Broadband Providers to Police Content or Corn Growers Will Suffer

Multichannel News’ Ted Hearn has flagged for us one of the most overreaching set of comments filed today in the FCC’s net neutrality proceeding. If AT&T hadn’t set off some warning bells earlier this week, I’d almost think that comments submitted by NBC-Universal are some kind of practical joke, a sophisticated, legalistic version of Punk’d that only communications policy wonks could appreciate.

In a proceeding geared toward examining whether new regulations are needed to stop broadband providers from discriminating against unaffiliated content and application providers, NBC-U instead bootstraps the whole piracy issue and asks the FCC to force broadband providers to implement content scanning technologies and send warnings to alleged infringing customers that those technologies identify.

The Commission should make unmistakably clear, as part of its regulations governing broadband industry practices, that broadband service providers have an obligation to use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content, especially when such use represents huge percentages of their capacity and reduces the quality of service to other subscribers.

NBC-U pushes the rhetorical envelope throughout the documents. For example, the studio likens the absence of mandatory content scanning regulations to…allowing Fedex trucks to transport illegal drugs.

It is inconceivable that the U.S. government would stand by mutely and permit any other legitimate U.S. business to be hijacked in this fashion. Would the government permit Federal Express or UPS to knowingly operate delivery services in which 60-70% of the payload consisted of contraband, such as illegal drugs or stolen goods?

My favorite part of the filing is where NBC-U conflates piracy with the financial health of America’s corn-growing farmers and farm equipment manufacturers. Here’s the argument: pirated films reduce the number of theater-goers, which in turn results in lower popcorn sales, which in turn is not good for farmers.

For example, in the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theaters would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment.

WTF? Not only is NBC-U advocating a truly horrible idea (force broadband providers to monitor content for copyrighted material and threaten any “suspicious” customers), it does so in a ridiculous way. It could be worse, though. NBC-U could have actually submitted a well-written, well-reasoned legal document that advocated this horrible idea.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on June 15, 2007 7:06 PM to IP Democracy