Idiot Tech

We’ve dropped Radiohead’s name several times while discussing the future of… No, let’s face it. The present of the music industry, and how sharing affects consumption. But after a slumber party with a painfully uninformed Lily Allen, there’s now a taped interview making the rounds in which Ed O’Brien suggests, outside the offices of PRS For Music, that throttling the bandwidth of file sharers may be the answer to the big Problem, a “compromise” between doing nothing at all and cutting off internet connections.

It’s retarded.

First of all, Lily Allen is parroting talking points fed to her by an industry that funded its own most damning counter-argument. We now know that many in the industry know that file sharing is better than just good for business, but the very blood in its veins. We have empirical proof of this. Yet some still cling to old dreams in which the music industry survives, let alone thrives, when no one can listen to music without paying for it first.

Second, bandwidth throttling is only slightly less futile than cutting off connections. And it will never happen. At least not here in the US, and not likely in the UK or Europe either. As Sweden’s ISPs learned the hard way, crippling service to the most demanding customers is kind of like McDonald’s taking the meat out of fat people’s burgers. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out how that one would turn out.