CNET’s interview of Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, has attracted understandable interest over the past few days. Garland talks turkey and sense about how the internet will inevitably impact the movie business, just as it has the music and publishing industries:

What will happen is the studios will exhaust every available remedy and there will be a series of evolutions, meaning they will exhaust one remedy and a new one will present itself. These things will be pursued in tandem. They will pursue technological intervention on the Internet. This goes to the study at NYU that basically says this has had no effect. Ultimately, because they are spending a lot of money and not getting results, they’ll become disillusioned with these vendors. They’ll clean house. But something else will present itself.

I think he’s right about where we are, and I think he’s right about where we’re going in the future, but I think he and almost everyone else stop short of where we’re ultimately headed. And I’m not saying that as a criticism: Garland properly frames his comments in the context of survivability, not ultimate truth. The goal is getting your industry through the transition, after which things will of course continue to evolve.

Still, I think the lines of convergence are pretty clear, even if they still resolve over the horizon. Everything people think they know about the internet is predicated on a set of relatively arbitrary decisions. Net neutrality is one instance, anonymity is another. Flip a couple of simple switches and suddenly the internet doesn’t look like the wild west or a commune, it looks like Big Brother or a corporate bureaucracy.  [ Read more ]