I was browsing the web for the ten thousandth time by noon this Sunday when I ran into this post on Boing Boing referring to this article on the Latimes website. The post is deliciously snarky about the current fortunes of uber senator turned lobbyist, Chris Dodd; implying that his crocodile tears are not credible give the reach and power of the media companies that the MPAA represents. These companies include TV stations, movie studios, you know – the information gate keepers. But guess what, Cory is wrong, those are real tears pal!
Look, results matter and the ‘internet community’ stopped SOPA. The reasonable assumption then is that the same interests will be able to stop any other bill related to their livelihood that comes along using the same or better tactics, unless the MPAA finds a way to put those tactics outside the rules of war. Any way you slice it though, the game has changed. And not just on the political front, as exciting as it is, but on the ‘reality’ front. What Dodd recognizes is that the MPAA and the companies it represents are a waning power in terms of how content is distributed online. As truly powerful as they are (and make no mistake, these companies tend to produce upwards of 90% of all the information you consume), they cannot match some of the emerging power of this new disruptive medium – the internet. The battle over SOPA empirically proves this.
And this is no abstract concept or clever opinion. Lets look at the facts. The ‘internet’, by which I mean the companies and individuals who make a living off its existence, has some characteristics and advantages that the old media empire that the MPAA represents does not have. Some examples:
The internet is instant
The time it takes for people to decide to do something on the internet and when they do it can be measured in seconds. I dare you to go to Wikipedia the second a top shelf celebrity has a baby and check on their personal life info to see if its there. Seconds baby, microseconds son. If you scale that to political action you can see what the MPAA is up against. It takes weeks and months to get through their distribution mechanisms. No amount of strategy buys them that kind of quickness. In terms of product, this means that while the studios are twiddling their thumbs, movie makers and bands are reaching their fans quickly at the speed of thought. Instant is great for any distribution medium and the internet trumps the old ways quite a bit. The occupy movement did not organize over newspapers and TVs and radio stations like the civil rights movement.They did it over the internet. Else what they did would have been impossible.
The internet has scale
More than 2 billion people are on the internet. This means that coupled with the above you can reach massively more people than the old guard that the MPAA represents in a shorter time. That’s the definition of strategic advantage that these companies understand.
The internet creates community
For reasons we won’t analyze here, the internet in general seems to have a ‘community’; people who dote on it, consider it something akin to a hobby or their young and thus want to protect it. Now many companies, social phenomenon and niches of old media command this kind of community reaction, but absolutely none with the intensity of fervor as the internet. Sure I’m a James bond movie aficionado, but that does Chris Dodd absolutely no good in this kind of argument. Communities serve many purposes and one of them is defense. A scaled community that defends itself needs to be feared a bit.
The internet is global
The companies that the MPAA represents are headquartered in the west – America and to a lesser extent, Europe. The MPAA means nothing in China or South America unless you’re counting its efforts to use the WTO to its own ends. It’s a mere trivia question in Africa. Even the content that the MPAA produces is not quite global. The closest thing that comes to that is movies, but even then the variation in product, the need to culturally sensitive content, language etc. makes them less than an ideal global medium. In contrast, the internet and its product are most readily global. Sure it has language barriers but in large part those are smaller problems than movies, both due to technology (language packs > language dubs) and content bias. Internet companies have found it fairly easy to scale globally much quicker than traditional media companies as a result.
In summary, Hollywood gets that as a distribution platform, it is being supplanted and they want to put the brakes on this while they figure out how to control this new future. They reason (correctly) that they still have firm control of the content and thus have some say in how this goes. Of course they’re going about this the wrong way, but don’t you for a second imagine that these old guard companies can compete with “ an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there’s no fact-checker." This is so true it hurts. You cannot. At least not until the next thing comes along (Telepathy anyone?)
At the risk of acting like the lowest form of internet blogger worm there is, and linking to my own previous blog post like some self important douche, read Facebook’s integration strategy on this blog. There I try to make the point that Facebook is no longer just a social network, but a distribution platform. The thing is that distribution platforms are meant to distribute content. When they become successful at it, other alternative distribution contents simply wither on the vine if they cannot compete. Thus is the fate of the MPAA companies, content control without as much distribution control as before, unless they buy a few senators to bend the rules. Billions are at stake.
As an aside, the whole ‘internet demonstration’ that was the SOPA protests were nice and all, but companies that make their living on the internet are sill advised to go pay a few lobbyists if they want to prevail in this long from over struggle.
2 Responses
Thank you for the sensible critique on ojiudezue.com . Me & my neighbor were just preparing to do some research about this. We got a grab a book from our local library but I think I learned more from this post. I am very glad to see such great information being shared freely out there.