| Hollings is full of it. No, he is just very stupid and/or misled.
The Congress finds:
(1) The lack of high quality digital content continues to hinder consumer adoption of broadband Internet service and digital television products.
This is exactly backwards, and should not be used to justify this bill. It is the lack of broadband Internet service availability which constrains the development and dissemination of high-quality original digital content. Moreover, blessing only the likes of Hollywood production companies with the term "high-quality" is offensive. Countries which develop a real broadband market will notice that a "geocities distributed into households" market in original digital content develops, and that the law of large numbers suggests that some of this content will be high quality (consider the best of geocities in its prime) by anyone's standards except possibly Congress's. That highly revenue-minded organizations might not know how to take advantage of a market of millions of always-on/high-speed-connected urban households in the USA is sad, but it ignores the question: why does such a market not exist? Simple: the iLECs are strangling it off. Perhaps their interests and the Hollywoods' interests dovetail so much that we could see mergers between big content owners and last-mile owners. Then there'd be the fun choice between actively-filtered broadband ("watch all the high quality [as determined by Congress!] digital content you can pay for, and see none of that darned free stuff!") and no broadband at all, on a market-by-market basis. Cooooool! So cool, in fact, that I think that this bill is doomed because it does not go far enough to support exactly that sort of development. Sean.