ASPEN, Colo.-The debates over net neutrality, protecting minors from nefarious content and digital rights management took a hiatus from their usual home in Washington, D.C., and were hashed out in picturesque Aspen, Colo. instead.
The annual mountain conference of the Progress & Freedom Foundation welcomed speakers from various halls of government and the corporate world to debate the lines where the two worlds intersect.
Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm Inc. told a lunchtime crowd that unless U.S. patent laws protect companies’ ability to gain a return upon investments in innovation, it risks pulling the rug out from under the innovation that has helped drive the country’s economy; 60 percent of Qualcomm’s annual profits comes from licensing agreements, Jacobs said. He also pointed out that should the United States weaken its rules, its ability to get “other countries to clean up their act will be greatly diminished.”
Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp., echoed those thoughts from the content side in a later address, saying that the impact of copyrighted content on the U.S. economy is “as important today as automobiles, steel and coal were yesterday, and that is an asset and an annuity that should be protected and guaranteed.”
Redstone also voiced the opinion that content is still king, noting that “people do not watch CBS; they watch CSI.” But while the music industry in particular has made progress on encouraging legal downloads of music, Redstone added that “the very technologies that allow us to sell more content enable infringers to steal it, over more platforms all over the world.”
The Walt Disney Co.’s Ann Sweeney talked about the company’s phenomenal success in making episodes from its broadcast channels available on the Internet for download through Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes store and through Disney’s own Web sites, in some cases with episodes being ad-supported. Sweeney said that Disney was open to doing other, similar distribution deals with its content-so long as the distributors meet several criteria, including having a brand “compatible with Disney,” providing a quality customer experience, having a growth strategy, respecting intellectual property rights, compensating the company for its content and having a marketing strategy beyond relying on the Disney brand.
Michael Altschul of wireless industry trade association CTIA noted during a panel on protecting children from inappropriate content that all the problems of restricting access are moving into the wireless space, as video, music and games become increasingly accessed via wireless. While wireless carriers have voluntarily agreed not to provide adult content until the tools are in place to keep minors away from it, Altschul said, when customers go outside the carriers’ walled gardens, those restrictions fall by the wayside. Still, more carriers are making sure that parents have the ability to restrict their children’s access to the open Internet, what calls children can make and receive, and to keep tabs on kids via GPS tracking of handsets.
One surefire way to protect minors, the panelists agreed, was to educate parents on the various technologies available to them to control their children’s access to adult programming on TV and on the Internet, and on the importance of parental supervision. Richard Notebaert, chairman and chief executive officer of Qwest Communications International Inc., said that Qwest had put together an online Internet safety test for parents and had agreed to make grants to schools where 20 percent of parents agreed to take the test; the program started with 100 schools, and Qwest plans to expand the program.
In a possible intersection of industry and government, Thomas Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs, policy and communications for Verizon Communications Inc., said that his company didn’t oppose municipal entrants into broadband, and that Verizon is willing to partner with cities to deliver broadband, potentially using WiMAX or Wi-Fi technology-so long as cities had to meet the same standards and rules as industry market entrants.
And probably the most heated moments of the conference came during a panel on net neutrality, as representatives of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. sparred with those of the telecom industry over what seems to boil down to what sort of Internet the future holds: whether broadband and wireless companies will be allowed to restrict access to their networks, require payment for priority treatment of information and do exclusive deals that might shut other companies out of the networks.
