Live event coverage.  Live stream transmission.

Primer: The advent of broadband changed everything we thought we knew about music — particularly how recordings are distributed, promoted and accessed. While some traditional business models have been upended by the internet, the technology has been a boon to independent musicians who rely on the web to do everything from connecting with fans to booking shows to selling merchandise to collaborating with other artists. Over the past decade, Future of Music Coalition has followed these developments closely, while advocating for a legitimate digital music marketplace that compensates creators. With the open internet driving innovation, we’re just beginning to see what a world of fully licensed music services might look like. Yet some would prefer innovation on the web to be left solely to market forces, with little to no regulation to establish rules of the road for Internet Service Providers. Join us for an interactive discussion featuring policy experts, musicians and you.

Participants:

• Jonny 5 emcee, Flobots

• Rick Carnes President, Songwriters Guild of America

• Markham Erickson Holch & Erickson LLP + Executive Director, Open Internet Coalition

• Chris Guttman-McCabe VP, Regulatory Affairs, CTIA - The Wireless Association

• Gigi B. Sohn President, Public Knowledge

• Amy Schatz Reporter, The Wall Street Journal (moderator)

Oversight needed?

Chris Guttman-McCabe:  The internet is working.  A reasonable debate - what did Comcast do, and was it reasonable?  It took 2.5 years - do we really want a process like that?  If it takes 2.5 years to get through ‘a pretty simplistic case,’ it doesn’t work.  Not ‘rallying against internet freedom,’
more it’s about handing over control to the FCC.

Gigi Sohn: This is a process by which consumers can make complaints if ISPs are making preferential decisions.  Currently, ‘consumers have absolutely no place to go.  There are issues with end-to-end delivery of content.  ‘The reason we want to preserve the internet, because the ISPs haven’t had the guts to go ahead with their business plans…’

Chris Guttman-McCabe:  Actually, there is a great deal of prioritization, based on bandwidth.  So, one rule
is that they cannot degrade VoIP, often to the detriment of other services.  ‘Networks are managed so that consumers have a reasonable experience’…  if ‘4 or 5 want to download
a hi-def video, you are impacting someone else on that network,’ so ‘making it jsut work’ means that there has be priortization of stuff on a regular basis.  And ‘deep packet inspection’ also involves sifting through to fine spyware, adware, etc.

Markham Erickson: This is a very complex issue, but networks are being managed, and that is a good thing.  We don’t what to see quality of service turn into ‘decreases of investment into
infrastructure,’ and we want ‘what Chris’ member companies are doing’ to make things happen.  But, when you favor or prioritize some pieces of data over another, you ‘are degrading other traffic’.  ‘you can’t make something faster than light speed,’ so other stuff goes to the back of the line.  But if that turns into providers paying for that priority, that’s an issue.
‘That’s what we oppose’.