Science & Tech Quote by Hilary Rosen

The interesting move here is the judo flip: Rosen takes a fight everyone wants to frame as "the Internet versus old media" and drags it back onto older, more prosecutable terrain. "Targeted group of businesses" is corporate-grade language that pretends neutrality while telegraphing a strategy: pick sympathetic villains (not users, not the web itself) and isolate them as outlaws. It signals enforcement with a scalpel, not a net, even if the broader ecosystem is implicated.

The moral frame is packed into "creating opportunities for themselves using other people's property". The phrase launders a contested premise - that digital copying and distribution are best understood as property theft - into something that sounds self-evident. "Opportunities" makes the alleged wrongdoing feel opportunistic, even parasitic; it paints these companies as freeloaders monetizing someone else's labor. The subtext is also political: if you can define the problem as bad actors exploiting property, you can avoid the messier debate about access, innovation, fair use, and how culture actually circulates online.

Then comes the tell: "The Internet has very little to do with this". That's not descriptive; it's tactical. In practice, the Internet is the delivery mechanism and the business model. Rosen's line is meant to disarm the civil-liberties alarm bell and reposition the crackdown as conventional law-and-order, the kind that won't spook legislators or moderate consumers. It's a bid to make a disruptive, networked conflict sound like a familiar dispute over trespass and commerce - and to make opposition seem like a defense of exploitation rather than a defense of openness.