Hollings is full of it.
No, he is just very stupid and/or misled.
The Congress finds:
(1) The lack of high quality digital content continues to hinder
consumer adoption of broadband Internet service and digital television
products.
This is exactly backwards, and should not be used to justify this bill.
It is the lack of broadband Internet service availability which
constrains the development and dissemination of high-quality
original digital content.
Moreover, blessing only the likes of Hollywood production companies
with the term "high-quality" is offensive.
Countries which develop a real broadband market will notice
that a "geocities distributed into households" market in
original digital content develops, and that the law of large
numbers suggests that some of this content will be high
quality (consider the best of geocities in its prime) by
anyone's standards except possibly Congress's.
That highly revenue-minded organizations might not know how
to take advantage of a market of millions of always-on/high-speed-connected
urban households in the USA is sad, but it ignores the question:
why does such a market not exist? Simple: the iLECs are strangling it off.
Perhaps their interests and the Hollywoods' interests
dovetail so much that we could see mergers between big
content owners and last-mile owners. Then there'd be
the fun choice between actively-filtered broadband
("watch all the high quality [as determined by Congress!] digital
content you can pay for, and see none of that darned free stuff!")
and no broadband at all, on a market-by-market basis. Cooooool!
So cool, in fact, that I think that this bill is doomed because
it does not go far enough to support exactly that sort of development.
Sean.
