MPAA Front Group, Pretending To Represent Consumer Interests, Slams CloudFlare For Not Censoring The Internet

from the that's-not-how-it-works dept

So you may have seen reports last week charging CloudFlare and some other tech companies with "aiding" internet malware pushers. The "report," called "Enabling Malware" was announced in a press release last week from the Digital Citizens Alliance -- a group that describes itself as representing consumer interests online:

Digital Citizens is a consumer-oriented coalition focused on educating the public and policy makers on the threats that consumers face on the internet and the importance for internet stakeholders – individuals, government and industry - to make the Web a safer place.

And while the story wasn't picked up that widely, a few news sources did pick it up and repeated the false claim that DCA is a consumer advocacy group. TorrentFreak, FedScoop and Can-India also picked up the story, and all simply repeated DCA's claim to represent the interests of "digital citizens."

But that leaves out the reality: DCA is a group mostly funded by Hollywood, but also with support from the pharmaceutical industry, to systematically attack the internet and internet companies, for failing to censor the internet and block the sites and services that Hollywood and Big Pharma dislike. DCA has been instrumental in pushing false narratives about all the "evil" things online -- "counterfeit fire detectors! fake drugs!" -- in order to push policy makers to institute new laws to censor the internet. DCA buries this basic fact in its own description, merely noting that it "counts among its supporters... the health, pharmaceutical and creative industries."

The organization was formed in late 2012, partly as a response to the MPAA's big loss around SOPA. Recognizing that it needed to change tactics, the MPAA basically helped get DCA off the ground to push scare stories about horrible internet companies enabling "bad things" online, and how new laws and policies had to be created to stop those evil internet companies. Much of this was merely speculation for a while, based on the fact that every DCA report seemed to wrongly blame internet companies for other people using those tools to do bad things online. However, it became explicit thanks to the Sony Hack, which revealed that a key part of the MPAA's anti-Google plan, dubbed Project Goliath, involved having the DCA pay Mississippi's former Attorney General Mike Moore (who mentored its current AG, Jim Hood), to lobby Jim Hood to attack Google.

That doesn't sound like a project of organizations just interested in "digital safety." It sounds like a project designed to attack internet companies. And, thus, it should be no surprise that every time DCA's name pops up, it's attacking internet companies. It was the organization that put out a report getting a variety of state Attorneys General (sense a pattern here?) to attack YouTube, because some criminals posted videos on YouTube. Rather than recognizing that this is a way to gather evidence and go after actual criminals, DCA decided that YouTube should be blamed for not taking those videos down fast enough. It was also the organization that put out a laughable report declaring the cloud storage site Mega a "haven" for piracy, where the methodology made no sense. Mega encrypts its content, but DCA and its researchers didn't seem to understand that, so they simply found a few links inbound to infringing works, and extrapolated out that a huge percentage of files on Mega were infringing.

DCA's boss, Tom Galvin, magically was chosen to present to the National Association of Attorneys General back in 2013, just months after the organization was founded, and in timing that (coincidentally, I'm sure) lines up almost exactly with the MPAA's decision (as revealed in the Sony emails) to focus on state Attorneys General to attack Google. DCA's Twitter feed regularly retweets the MPAA and various other front groups set up by the legacy copyright industries, such as the Copyright Alliance.

In short, the Digital Citizens Alliance is not an alliance of "digital citizens" at all. It's a front group set up by the MPAA and some big pharmaceutical companies to pressure policy makers into getting internet companies to censor the internet. Don't buy it.

Filed Under: censorship, internet, piracy
Companies: cloudflare, dca, digital citizens alliance, google, mpaa, youtube