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ESPN’s plan to kill net neutrality

Mon, 13 May 2013 17:56:00 +0000

If you are someone who likes to watch live sports events on your mobile phone, then it is probably welcome news that ESPN may be in negotiations with a big telecom company to exempt its streaming video services from caps that limit how much data mobile users can download. Watching the NBA playoffs on your iPhone, without any free Wi-Fi to rely on, is an excellent way to chew speedily through your allotted bandwidth for the month. ESPN, reports the Wall Street Journal, wants to ensure that viewers get to eat as much cake as they want (and, of course, therefore be exposed to as many ESPN-delivered advertisements as possible).

But if you're not an ESPN addict, you might do well to look askance at the news. That's the take of Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest Washington-based public advocacy organization that quickly decried the possible ESPN deal as an obvious violation of the principle of "net neutrality."

FCC approves Comcast-NBC merger

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:15:17 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission is giving Comcast, the country's largest cable company, the green light to take over NBC Universal, home of the NBC television network.

The deal is still awaiting Justice Department approval, which is expected later Tuesday.

With the deal certain to transform the entertainment industry landscape, regulators are attaching conditions to prevent Comcast Corp. from trampling competitors once it takes control of NBC's vast media empire.

Among other things, the government is requiring Comcast to make NBC programming available to rival cable companies, satellite operators and new Internet video services that could pose a threat to Comcast's core cable business.

The FCC voted 4-to-1 Tuesday to let Comcast buy a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co. for $13.8 billion in cash and assets.

Comcast to bill content providers for access to subscribers

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:05:00 +0000

Level 3 Communications, an Internet backbone company that will support Netflix's movie streaming service next year, is complaining that cable giant Comcast wants money for the right to send data to its subscribers.

The company says the fee violates the principles of an "open Internet" and goes against the Federal Communications Commission's proposed rules preventing broadband Internet providers from favoring certain types of traffic.

However, the spat may be more reflective of the complicated commercial relationships of the Internet, where it's not always clear who should be paying whom.

The charges come at a sensitive time for Comcast Corp., which is trying to get regulatory clearance to buy NBC Universal.

Net neutrality ruling is a call to arms

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:07:00 +0000

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled today [PDF] that the Federal Communications Commission doesn't have the authority to enforce "net neutrality," which requires companies to treat all traffic over their networks equally.

The case was brought by Comcast. A little history: The initial case started in 2007, when Comcast customers noticed the company was "throttling," or slowing/stopping, peer-to-peer network sharing. (Peer-to-peer network sharing has many legitimate uses, but it is most known, of late, for being the way that BitTorrent and other media downloading apparatuses make illegal sharing of copyrighted materials possible.)

Why would Comcast care if people were sharing files? For a couple of reasons. Shared media files are often large (think: movie downloads) and take up a lot of bandwidth. Also, Comcast, being a cable company, is in the business of charging people to watch movies and television shows; if people are able to access those programs for free, it loses money. Beyond all of that, Comcast could afford to make P2P sharers angry -- in many places, your choice for fast Internet service is Comcast or no one. The fact that Comcast could do this under a thin veil of claiming to be stopping media piracy was just the icing on the cake. The choice to throttle made all kinds of business sense.

Do only idiots pay for cable?

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:15:00 +0000

A tweet from Mark Horowitz links to a New York Times story about the implications of the Comcast NBC deal for the future of online TV with a dismissive comment: "Anyone who still owns a TV or pays for cable is either an idiot... or is over 30."

Readers who recall my rant about Heidi Klum, Victoria's Secret, and the Black-Eyed Peas yesterday will understand that I am somewhat sympathetic to this view. But Mr. Horowitz seems to have only digested the beginning of the Times story, with its amusing anecdote about the daughter of a Disney exec questioning the necessity of having a TV in her college dorm room.

As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories.

"Mom, you don't understand. I don't need it," her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge.

That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

"You're going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall," she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. "You have to have one."

Welcoming our new Comcastic overlords

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:24:00 +0000

If all goes as planned, Comcast, the nation's largest cable network, will buy NBC Universal from GE. The new entity will be a bigger entertainment/distribution monster than Disney, News Corp. or Time Warner. That sound you hear is the final nail getting hammered into the coffin containing the corpse of the traditional broadcast network's cultural primacy.

And none too soon! A few months back, after noticing my children's primary interface with the media universe was through their computers, I canceled cable in a fit of puritanical economizing. But not too long afterwards, desperate to watch SEC football on CBS, I bought a cheap digital converter box so I could get over-the-air broadcasts.

Since then, I've felt like a time traveler/cultural anthropologist exploring the bizarre constraints of an artificially shrunken entertainment landscape. The world is a different, simpler place when there are only a handful of channels to choose from. For one thing, I suddenly encountered a stunning shortage of political pundits yapping with faux outrage over whatever's going on in Washington. This has been a balm and a blessing.

Comcast seals NBC deal

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Comcast Corp. announced Thursday it plans to buy a majority stake in NBC Universal for $13.75 billion, giving the nation's largest cable TV operator control of the Peacock network, an array of cable channels and a major movie studio.

Although the deal could mean that movies could reach cable more quickly after showing in theaters, and that TV shows could appear faster on cell phones and other devices, it was already raising concerns that Comcast would wield too much power over entertainment.

Indeed, if the deal clears regulatory and other hurdles, Comcast would rival the heft of The Walt Disney Co. -- which Comcast CEO Brian Roberts already tried to buy.

Comcast, which already serves a quarter of all U.S. households that pay for TV, would gain control of the NBC broadcast network, the Spanish-language Telemundo and about two dozen cable channels, including USA, Syfy and The Weather Channel. It also would get regional sports networks, Universal Pictures and theme parks.

In agreeing to buy 51 percent of NBC Universal from General Electric Co., which has controlled NBC since 1986, Comcast hopes to succeed in marrying distribution and content in a way Time Warner Inc. could not. AOL and Time Warner are undoing their ill-fated marriage Dec. 9. Time Warner has already shed its cable TV operations.

The telecom slayers

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:14:00 +0000

Ben Scott is smiling like a man who just hit the jackpot. As one of the coordinators of SavetheInternet.com, Scott is a leading advocate for Net neutrality, a congressional provision that would prohibit Internet service providers from charging Web sites for faster delivery of data. Scott is the closest thing there is to a field general in the grass-roots campaign to ensure Net neutrality, waging a daily battle with telecom giants AT&T and Verizon, who stand to boost their profits by creating toll roads on their Internet lines.

For more than a year, telecom lobbyists, who include former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, have outgunned Scott and his ragtag army of bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs and consumer-rights activists on Capitol Hill. But on this fall day in his bare-bones office in Washington, Scott is grinning in victory. He knows he has succeeded in tripping up the lobbying goliaths with a simple weapon that couldn't be more appropriate in the battle over the Internet: a low-budget video posted on YouTube.com.

Meet the new AT&T, same as the old AT&T, only worse

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 19:01:00 +0000

The good folks at Public Knowledge are trying to spin Wednesday's defeat of a proposed "network neutrality" amendment to new telecom legislation working its way through Congress as "more encouraging" than it might seem. "Those of us who advocate for an open Internet substantially narrowed the gap between our position and those who side with AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to close off innovation," said Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president.

For those of you whose brains stop working when you hear the words "network neutality," the issue is this. The big telcos and cable companies want to be able to charge extra for faster delivery of information over the Internet. This would, for old-school Net geeks and Internet-based companies like Google and Amazon, amount to breaking the Net, which has always treated all information that passes through its pipes with the same impartial treatment. For an excellent, thoroughly comprehensive exploration of the issue, read the story written by Salon's own Farhad Manjoo two weeks ago.

Keeping the Net neutral

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:30:00 +0000

When you ask Gerry Waldron, a prominent Washington attorney, why he's pushing hard to have the government regulate cable Internet services, he presents you with a comical hypothetical situation. "Imagine if you called 1-800-L.L.-Bean and your phone company said, 'Sorry, we're not going to connect your call because we have a deal with Land's End.'" For telephone service, that would be preposterous; the phone company is prevented both by laws and by customer outrage from limiting your calls to specific phone numbers.

But Waldron says that on the broadband Internet, customers enjoy no such protections. If your cable company decides it wants to sign a deal with Land's End and stop you from visiting L.L. Bean's Web site, it's free to do so -- what are you going to do, find a new cable company? "And that situation gets us worried that the Internet that we've grown up with, the Internet that has been characterized by consumers' ability to go wherever they want -- that may not continue in the broadband age," says Waldron.