The World Wide Web Consortium, once the world’s most trusted source of open standards, is helping Comcast make a DRM standard designed to give studios a veto over the legal use of their programming — something that would have prevented the cable industry from ever coming into being.
Comcast and its allies have successfully pushed the W3C to add restrictions to the Web, a first in the organization’s history, which is full of its heroic efforts to remove restrictions (for example, the W3C members forces its members agree not to use their patents to shut down innovative Web technology).
The W3C has decided to let Comcast and its allies plow ahead with the DRM, without any safeguards for the next generation of new Comcasts, new industries that rely on doing something the existing industry doesn’t like, but which the law allows — meaning that we’ll never see the benefits of those new industries.
Imagine you wanted to start a business that intercepted the most expensive, high-production-value video content in the country and retransmitted it on your own wires, charging your customers for the privilege and not sending a dime back to the broadcasters or production studios.
Sounds like piracy?
It’s the cable industry, at its inception in 1948. Back then, cable was called “Community Antenna TV,” and it was pioneered by scrappy, daring entrepreneurs who erected titanic broadcast receiver antennas with the height to tune in distant TV signals that were too faint for their customers’ set-top rabbit-ears. These companies ran physical cables from the antennas to their customers’ homes, providing them with TV service — for a fee.
The broadcasters squawked, called it piracy, but the cable operators stuck to their guns, and successfully lobbied Congress to set a compulsory licensing scheme that let them retransmit any signals they could tune, at a fixed fee, without having to negotiate with broadcasters.
Cable began as an industry founded on the principle that it was better to beg forgiveness than get permission — especially permission from an incumbent broadcast industry that wanted no part of any new, “disruptive” business models that might upset its apple cart.
Today, Comcast is one of a handful of entertainment companies, incumbent browser vendors, and companies that make products that restrict your access to your own computer who’ve successfully co-opted the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the world’s leading maker of standards for the open Web, into standardizing a system that will prevent anyone from ever doing to today’s cable operators what they did to broadcasters a generation ago.
Save Comcast! [EFF]