Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/957795
48 DGA QUARTERLY I M A G I N E Y O U F E L L I N T O a deep sleep in 2010 and didn't awake until 2018. What would have changed regarding technology and regulation over the last eight years? How di erent is our contem- porary world from the one we left behind and why is this important to DGA members? There has, of course, been significant change, some of it quite dramatic and unexpected. The Silicon Valley of 2018 looks increasingly like the Wall Street of 2010. Back then, most Americans loved technological innovators. Eight years later, however, there is increasing skepticism about the impact of social media, fake news and technologi- cal addiction on society. Yet for all this dramatic change, much about 2018 is little different from 2010. Big Tech—epitomized b y w h a t C N B C f i n a n c i a l pundit Jim Cramer dubbed the FANG super-stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google— continues to tighten its hold on our econ- omy, particularly in the media and enter- tainment sectors. And then there's the simultaneously complex and yet very simple techno-political drama over network neutrality—which has both radically changed and yet stayed exactly the same over the last eight years. This paradox isn't surprising giv- en that many of the things that have both mostly changed and stayed the same over the last eight years—the increasingly ubiquitous power of Big Tech, the paralysis of federal government institu- tions, particularly Congress, and the change in the public's attitude toward Silicon Valley—are inti- mately bound up with the net neutrality brouhaha. Back in 2010, I wrote a piece for this magazine underscoring the political, economic and tech- nological signifi cance of net neutrality. I focused particularly on its relevance to the entertainment industry. The DGA's position at that time was nuanced. It supported net neutrality, but was heav- ily concerned that proposed legislation did not ad- equately deal with Internet piracy of its members' work. Despite the complexity of the issue, at its most basic level, I explained, net neutrality is a "political and economic war that pits the builders of the net- work against the major riders on that network." It pits the providers of the network's pipes like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast against the most popular edge providers—the FANGs whose videocentric customers increasingly dominate traffic on the network. Then as now, the political fight over net neu- trality is essentially about who controls the flow of tra c on the Internet. It's an argument over whether the telcos and cable compa- nies, the so-called Internet S e r v i c e P r ov i d e r s ( I S Ps ) , s h o u l d l e g a l l y b e able to discriminate between the differ- ent types of data that travel in packets over their network. The key question, eight years ago, focused on whether there was a need for government regulators to impose a level playing fi eld on ISPs for how these packets are distributed. As Wired magazine put it in 2010, net neutral- ity is "shorthand for the idea that the government should mandate that ISPs act as dumb pipes that transmit data across the net without regards to what is in the data packets." So how did the 2010 net neutrality debate im- pact the movie business? On one level, Hollywood, as a creator of high-quality content, was caught in the crossfi re between the ISPs and the Silicon Valley edge providers—the two principal antago- nists in the struggle. The studios seemingly didn't have a dog in the fi ght and might've been considered neutral players. But others in the industry, including the DGA and The Net Neutrality Conundrum Conundrum Neutrality Conundrum Neutrality Conundrum Conundrum Conundrum Conundrum Issues surrounding the Internet and its use are complex and multifaceted. For that reason, the DGA Quarterly is devoting signifi cant space and thought to presenting these issues. The last issue of the Quarterly presented the latest in a series of articles written for the DGA by Andrew Keen, author of four books on the digital revo- lution, including his latest, How to Fix the Future. Keen is also executive director of the Silicon Valley innova- tion salon FutureCast. In this issue, Keen revisits his provocative 2010 article on the net neutrality debate. ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID PLUNKERT Eight years later, we fi nd ourselves asking: "Why shouldn't net neutrality apply to the entire Internet?" By Andrew Keen