The MPAA comments in the FCC's Net Neutrality proceeding cautions against taking steps that would interfere with the deployment of watermarking, filtering, deep packet inspection, and so on. What's the connection exactly? Part of it is unknown--since the technologies are new, and are just being deployed. Part of it is known... much of the dispute about technologies being deployed to protect content (not just in the sense of protecting copyrighted content, but in the sense of security generally) is about who will pay for it. The content creator? The network infrastructure engineers? The developers of software used in distribution? The retailer? The CPE manufacturer? Insofar as net neutrality principles end up constraining who may charge whom for what, they may preclude otherwise desirable arrangements of who bears the costs. And insofar as net neutrality constrains one player on the net from blocking or interfering with another, it may hamper efforts to control piracy like spam, by impeding traffic carried by or through disreputable ports of call.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:14 AM | DRM & Watermarks, etc., Infrastructure, Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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