OK Go Weighs In On Net Neutrality & Music Industry
Known more notably for his role as frontman of the viral video and YouTube sensations OK Go and his perspective on being that very thing on a record label that willfully disables the sharing functionality that made his group famous, Damian Kulash is now weighing in on an issue even more near and dear to his heart: net neutrality and the future of the web.
From his perspective, many of the negotiations taking place today that have the potential to strip the founding ideologies from the web and have real consequences on how future generations experience it; he relates these trying times to his experience of the music and record industries.
The idea at the core of net neutrality is that the ones and zeros that I send somewhere shouldn’t have to wait in line behind those of the wealthy or corporations, whom, as you might imagine, would be delighted to pay ever so handsomely to ensure that their “packets” are treated with much more urgency than mine. Without this functionality (read: corruption), Internet service providers can’t pick favorites and have to treat everyone on the web equally, regardless of their ability to line their pockets with money or houses with plasma screen TVs.
To Kulash, this is important because the record and music industries are a running example of what happens when success is determined more so on one’s ability to buy it than their creativity and innovation. He argues further that maybe we can live with this kind of thinking driving music marketing and consumption, but that we shouldn’t let it undermine the transmission of ideas themselves.
The purity of the web and how it levels the playing field across many industries—that’s what makes it revolutionary—and Kulash hopes we don’t forget that:
"the past decade of the music industry is as clear an example as you can find of what happens when the depth of pockets, not the quality of ideas, is the arbiter of success…The lesson is that insider's clubs don't nurture the best ideas, which is the whole point of markets: Competition is supposed to keep everyone on their toes…The Internet is the purest marketplace for ideas that the world has ever seen, and the amazing power of such a level playing field has revolutionized everything.
Google knows this better than anyone… Now that the Internet has been around long enough to have developed its own giants, though, we need to make sure they don't ruin what's great about the technology that made them. We need to make sure they don't crush the idea industry the way the music giants crushed the music industry." (Read the rest.)
what a doofus! stick to writing music.
musicians need to get back to writing better music.
Yawn. Ok Go, please ok go away.
Sold 23k records after playing all the major late night shows AND receiving 6 million views on a YouTube music vid; dropped. Interesting case study.
The article in the Post and the quotes here demonstrate a naive (at best) understanding of the entire issue.
– Net Neutrality = Government Regulation. You are too young to remember that government regulated long distance used to cost Americans .60 cents a minute.
– Profit incentives, and not much else, drives innovation.
– Profitable competition is the only thing that will hold or drive down prices, not government regulation.
– A level playing field = inadequate incentive.
– Do you really want all these large telecom companies (neutered into becoming public utilities) jointly lobbying the FCC/Congress for annual price increase – year after year, and all passed onto to consumers?
– Wireless Internet is different. Let these large telecom and tech companies merge and fight it out. Consumers will win.
– Government (over) regulation, and not the lack of it, is what causes consumers to only have one or two (at best) choices for wired Internet in our homes.
– Etc, etc, etc.
Be careful what you wish for and thoroughly research both sides of the argument. Government oversight can be useful as a notice, but government regulation usually ends in unbalanced disaster.