On Jan 23, 2012 I wrote There is no tech industry, on the subject of Rants, Politics, and Internet.

In the aftermath of the big protest against the US SOPA bill, I've seen a fair few people (including Joel Spolsky) ask the question: why are we not lobbying for laws? Why is it that other interests try and oppress the internet and we fight back; shouldn't we be taking the fight to them? Lobby and push for laws that make the net better, and have them fight us for once?

This thought, while it's got the fist-in-the-air fight-the-power undertones that go over well with the internet crowd, is a bit worrying.

The movie and TV industry spent ninety million dollars lobbying the American government in 2011. Where's our ninety million? Most of the tech industry is struggling to stay alive on VC money and the occasional payment; there's no central fund, and no-one with the expertise to do the lobbying anyway, especially when that's combined with the sneaking sense that paying money for attention and to get laws passed is Not Really Cricket.

Hang on, though; the big players have a whole ton of money. Ninety million is about two days profit for Apple, about four days profit for Google, about the same for Microsoft, about the same for Oracle. Seriously, if those four firms donated one day's profit, the tech industry could throw a hundred and fifty million dollars into the pot without serious effort. The MPAA have recently started demanding quid pro quo for their donated money; maybe this is the time to get in the game and outspend them. Any one of the four firms above, and probably others besides, could swallow up the whole movie industry without so much as a gulp if they wanted.

But then we hit the biggest problem. I've been talking about "the tech industry" like it's a thing. There is no tech industry.

The movie people get this right. No-one's lobbying for only movies by Twentieth Century Fox to get extra copyright protection. No-one's arguing that TV programmes should be blocked from being written to DVDs but only if they've got Martin Sheen in them. They work together. What we laughingly call "the tech industry" does not. Do you honestly think that if Apple or Microsoft or Oracle throw down a hundred million notes on a law that that law will benefit startups and Canonical and Red Hat and hobby programmers? If Microsoft throw down that money, do you think the resulting legislation will benefit Apple? Hell no. There's almost no sense of collaboration in the "tech industry" at all; we're a bunch of scratching yowling cats in a bag, too busy fighting one another to maintain a front against outside opposition.

What's the solution here? I don't know. But I'm wary of a world where the interests of the movie industry are less effective in the American Congress but have been replaced by the interests of multi-billion-dollar computer companies. That doesn't seem to benefit the internet all that much.

Michael Banck

More cynical people say this is exactly the problem: SOPA/PIPA is a con by congress/senate to coerce the tech industry to finally pay their expected amount of lobbying dollars to the policitians.

It seems like grassroots lobbying won over the other one this time, if we keep it up, we might be able to change the game, who knows. But as Spolsky commented, we'd have to double-down on it now.

Jakub Steiner

Maybe the big guys aren't really into your "abolish software patents" thing.

sil

Michael: as Spolsky points out, grassroots lobbying is essentially an opposition force. It's "don't do this thing". It's not good at all at "do this thing".

Jakub: yeah. If we didn't have the patent system, how would Samsung sue Apple, or Apple sue Samsung? I had a paragraph about that in the draft, but deleted it :)

Michael Burke

There's an old argument that the movie/music industry are too behind the times. They should be embracing the digital format, not working against it. For a time I felt that they were doing this, digital download centres sprouted up delivering content to the user.

However, they took too long and Apple cornered the market. I won't go in to how, but the Music/Film industry are trying to play Apple at it's own game, and release these stores that mimic but not better Apple's iTunes offering.

One of the main failings of the music/film industry's fight against piracy is the cost of the goods. Amazon for example charge about £5 less for the Kindle version of a hardback book. Are they trying to say that it costs £5 to print the work on paper? It costs £10 to buy a CD from ASDA but costs £7/8 for the digital download. Again, £3 for a CD? To be pressed, packaged, shipped to a shop and sold? No, there is something wrong there.

This SOPA bill was the music/film industry's way of saying "look, we give up, we need to curb the use of the digital medium to protect our profits. We "tried" to embrace it, but it hasn't worked".

That's my 2 cents, well it would be 3 cents in a physical format :)

sil

Michael: see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html and the earlier entries in Charlie's CMAP series for why ebooks being different prices is not as simple as you think it is.

Aquarion

There isn't a "The Movie Industry" either, though. There are lobbying groups that are financed by multi-million dollar movie companies to convince the law to do what they want it to. The tiny movie companies, scraping money from family, movie funding people and government grants to make the idea they hope can keep them going (People who do things like Monochrome (http://www.tlimono.com/)) (Very much like startups, a labour of love every one) aren't part of that "The Movie Industry" and a lot of them are against SOPA.

The thing that we have is the EFF and the Open Rights Group, but they don't get the funding from the big tech companies, or anything close to it.

Plus, the tech industry is, in general, not willing to be seen to be playing dirty yet, which is how things like SOPA/PIPA and the RIAA ever happen.

sil

Aquarion: fair comment. The distinction I'd draw is that the multi-million-dollar movie companies work together (even if this screws movie startups); tech industry giants don't even work together amongst themselves.

Rodney Dawes

Stuart. Oh Stuart. How you have overlooked the multitudes of smaller things that even allowed you to host this blog to post the rant on. There is a tech industry. They have worked together on a vast number of things. TCP, IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, RSS, DNS… In fact, the Internet is nothing if not a collaboration between thousands of tech companies, big and small. If there were no "tech industry" working together, then there would be no Internet to even worry about saving. There would be AOL, Compuserve, or Prodigy perhaps; but there would be no freedom, for which to maintain.

sil

Rodney: that's the tech industry working within itself. It's not the tech industry working *with other industries*, and it's especially not the tech industry working with government. Basically every interaction that is now useful which involved tech and government working together (ICANN, name registration generally, network neutrality) is all stuff that got built in to the first versions of the internet and was then grandfathered in through inertia; there wasn't discussion about how it should work, it just was always that way. I'm pretty sure that if someone sat down and designed the DNS now, in cooperation with governments and whatnot, it wouldn't look like it does...

Lucio

Is google is in the tech industry? They make money from ads. Is apple is in the tech industry? They sell devices to buy content from them. So, then, amazon must be a in the tech industry, right?

sil

Yep, Amazon are in the tech industry. (They've got less cash on hand to invest in lobbying, because they're spending it all on Kindles right now.) They're another large tech firm who are more than happy to do things that benefit Amazon at the expense of competitors, though.

Benjamin Otte

I'd rather have SOPA _and_ PIPA than the tech giants working together. Because if they did, the internet would only carry content they like - just like the radio only carries content the RIAA likes and cinemas only carry content the MPAA likes.

Also, you might remember the last time all the tech giants agreed. That brought us Windows 95.

sil

Benjamin: yeah, that's what I'm worried about, which is why I'm concerned about the "why don't we, the citizens of the net, start pushing for our own laws" approach that Joel S and others are advocating.

Jon

Forgive me if I've missed you dealing with this in your post, but I assume the idea that the tech industry could effectively lobby for things is based not on its ability to generate lots of cash to pay for traditional lobbyists, but to organise a 'crowd sourced' lobby.

This is how SOPA/PIPA were forced on to the back burner: it wasn't about Wikipedia and Google donating lots to campaign funds, but by getting hundreds of thousands of people to write to their representatives.

It's also how the 360 degrees group operates in the UK: picking issues, and then making it as easy as possible for lots of people to get in touch with their representatives about it.

It has exactly the same effect as traditional lobbying (making representatives think that they'll lose votes/their seat in the next election), but it's as a result of individuals saying 'I'm not going to vote for you' rather than a fear that they won't be able to get their adverts on another TV stations.

Whether this is a good thing or not, I don't know.

sil

Jon: I'd be interested in hearing any examples of someone crowd-sourcing a positive policy prescription and it being successful. 36 degrees and the Open Rights Group in the UK, SOPA protests, DMCA protests: they're all "we oppose thing X". I'm not aware of anyone coming up with a positive thing that should be done and then crowd-sourcing people to ask for it and then it happening, but I'd be eager to hear of one. It's relatively easy (ha!) to mobilise people on a "oppose this thing" message; mobilising people pro- rather than anti- is harder.

Christy Eller

Just wanted to agree with you, wholeheartedly. These same thought have been passing through my mind in the past few days. I have also been feeling a real desire to market open source to the world at large.

The other night, when I described my work for GNOME, a friend said to me, "Yeah, I've heard of Linux, but I thought it went out of business." I think this is tragic. "We" need to get the word out about who we are, and what we do, and how the likes of businesses from Wordpress to Google are built on open source code.

John Cooper

I for one don't want to start encouraging Apple and Oracle to band together and start getting changes made to the law. Can you imagine the sort of crazy things they would want?

The problem is in the lobbying in the first place. I doubt that the "Tech Industry" would want anything different from the "Movie Industry" larger returns for their shareholders. The reason that allowing lobbying will always fail is that it puts to much pressure on the people in government to ignore their primary duty to the population at large.

The Movie Industry is not doing anything new. They saw a threat to their business so they invest in protecting it. The fact that it is cheaper to change the law than adapt your business model shows how broken the US version of a free market really is.