Bono vs The internet

The interwebs were buzzing angrily yesterday because of something Bono* said. Bono, remember him? He’s the frontman for that famous Irish rock band U2. In a recent op-ed piece for the New York Times, he suggested that the net should be policed to a certain extent to stop what he dubbed reverse Robin Hooding. He wrote: “A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.”

His opinions drew criticism from across the board, some of it sanguine, most of it less than so. Most pointed out that the idea was infeasible, both from an economic and practical point of view. They argued that even a repressive government like China has failed to completely monitor net traffic, and that it isn’t entirely true that online file sharing has killed off the music industry. True, the argument that free online music is hurting artists is hard to swallow, coming from a wealthy rocker like Bono. And it probably wasn’t a smart move to use Chinese totalitarianism as an example of how the internet might be curbed to benefit the free world, though China has not only monitored and censored the net to crush dissidence.

Rupert Murdoch caused some grinding of teeth as well a few months ago when he threatened to hide his news sites from Google. He claimed that Google was effectively stealing his copyrights by organising content that had originated from News Corporations sites, then selling advertising against it. Google and other search sites have changed the way news is distributed by making themselves the news destinations of choice. Murdoch doesn’t like this at all. He suggests that by hiding content from Google, consumers might be convinced to dip into their pockets to gain access his websites.

Personally, I think that Murdoch is a shrivelled wine sack who should have been put to pasture years ago, but he does happen to have a point. The current news distribution model is unsustainable because the people who lose out the most are the producers and writers those news articles. Going cold turkey on Google may not be the answer, the consensus does seem to be that the status quo cannot be maintained forever.

Both Murdoch and Bono speak to a deeper issue here. Ever since its birth over 15 years ago, the internet as grown at an unfathomable rate and is now a gigantic behemoth that devours everything in its path. Copyrights, child protection laws, intellectual property, all these ideas have been sacrificed on the altar of “that free forum”. A determined person with the right set of tools could gain access to anything — anything, d’ye hear — that is online. The unrestricted flow of information on the internet has gutted the music and news industries. As Bono hinted in his column, Hollywood could be next. The only thing stopping you from downloading the entire season of 24 is bandwidth, and that problem is going to go away soon.

It seems that efforts to curb the devouring leviathan that the internet has turned into have finally begun. It’s a shame that the faces of this new movement are a drooling onanist in the form of Murdoch and that filthy rich rock star Bono.

*Real name Paul David Hewson. Yeah, I’d have gone with Bono as well. His name belongs on a plumber.