When you watch a dog chasing its tail around and around in circles, the obvious question posed to the dog is “what are you going to do with it if you ever catch it?”
Well, politically liberal activist groups have been chasing their own tails for years, criticizing content and media companies for, well, just about everything they do, and of course all in the name of “protecting consumers.”
But in their latest attack, these activists have caught their own tails, and in the course of doing so have demonstrated that their real agenda is anything but innovation and consumer benefit.
The activists’ latest complaint is a new video service called TV Everywhere. TV Everywhere allows consumers to watch their pay TV—that is, content they have already paid for through their subscription to satellite, cable or the “telephone companies”—on Internet-connected devices, whether laptops, smart phones, PCs or other devices.
Sensing an opportunity to deliver more content to more places and provide consumers with more freedom, content companies negotiated with distributors to enable not just TV Everywhere but also the many announced and planned competitors to the concept. Simply put, TV Everywhere and similar concepts are products that allow the consumer to choose the venue and timing for enjoying content that they’ve already paid for.
What possible complaint could so-called consumer activists have with this clear benefit to consumers? That not everyone can get the content for which others have paid. That is, if you’ve paid for television programming then you can watch it anywhere, but those who didn’t pay for it cannot have it for free.
In other words, you buy a beer but everyone else in the bar should get one, too.
The other cartoonish complaint? That these new offerings might increase customer loyalty because the offerings are so desirable. Well, yeah. That’s what businesses try to do. That’s called pleasing your customers. That’s what markets are all about, and it’s why markets work, though it’s no surprise to us that left-wing activists don’t understand the most basic concepts of markets.
Funny. We thought the idea was that companies should be constantly innovating new ways to please their customers and to make content more easily and more widely available on a variety of devices and in a variety of formats.
We’ve gone well down the rabbit hole when supposedly pro-consumer technology groups reflexively criticize companies that are innovating precisely the new services that their customers say they want.
And remember, these are the very same activists demanding that government implement unnecessary and counterproductive “net neutrality” regulations to govern the Internet.
Public Knowledge, you’ve caught your own tail. Now what are you going to do with it?
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Today's TechByte was written by Bartlett D. Cleland, director of IPI Center for Technology Freedom.