News Corp. Shuts Off Hulu Access To Cablevision 316
ideonexus writes "Normally when we advocate Net Neutrality, we are talking about preventing ISPs from discriminating against content providers, but in this case, the content provider is discriminating against the ISP. Is this a new dimension in the Net Neutrality fight? From the article: 'Cablevision internet customers lost access to Fox.com and Fox programming on Hulu for a time Saturday afternoon — the result of a misguided effort on News Corp.'s part to cut off online viewing as an alternative in its standoff with the cable operator over retrans fees. Fox stations in NYC, Philadelphia, and New Jersey went dark at midnight Friday when negotiations between the two broke down.'"
But of course.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Fox content at Hulu was restored when they realized they didn't have the capability to block only Cablevision customers in the area. All of the NY/Philly area was blacked out, when their beef is only with one ISP.
Re:But of course.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they really do that? Idiots. It isn't hard to get a list of IP blocks allocated an ISP.
To me this brings up another example of how the general idea of net neutrality is simple, while the details are not. Most of us would agree that this behavior is anti-competitive, but where do you draw the line? Many sites block entire countries, because they don't have the legal right to serve the same content in all regions. Many sites ban entire countries or IP blocks due to spamming and/or other malicious behavior that has come from those blocks. Is that acceptable? If so, given that you can find malicious behavior coming just about every IP block (botnets), does that mean that it could be used an excuse to ban whoever you wish?
Re:We'll know nine months later what the effect wa (Score:3, Interesting)
Dennis Potter had it right (Score:3, Interesting)
-- Dennis Potter (source [youtube.com])
Re:News Corp/Fox is out of control (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Net Neutraility? (Score:4, Interesting)
My business is just me (technically) plus a few contractors. At what point are we and our interests no longer individuals? When I hire my first full-time employee? My tenth? My twentieth?
As a disregarded entity (the technical term for 'I pay personal income tax on everything rather than corporate taxes') there is a lot of co-mingling between my personal funds and my business, mostly because I can wave my hand and decide to pay myself whenever I want, since I have to pay income tax on all of it anyway. Should I be restricted from spending some or all of that money on political contributions or PACs?
Obviously, the larger my business gets, the more likely its interests will start diverging (or at least running parallel as a separate entity) to my personal interests, but that's perfectly normal. I still have to earn money, and once I've earned that money, why should anyone other than me decide what causes I can support with it?
Re:Who are the good guys? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the same with all cartels, be they drugs, media, or internet service: the true bad guy is the government for failing to properly regulate the market.
Re:News Corp/Fox is out of control (Score:3, Interesting)
I think cable companies have it worse than Dish because they have to pay fees on "homes past", meaning they are paying a fee for every home that could potentially subscribe to the content. I've been told by multiple people "half your cable bill is ESPN, whether you wanted it or not".
Cable companies have been trying to move to a la carte style where you only pay for channels you want... but they have been getting blocked by ESPN and others threatening to pull out. Cable company with no ESPN isn't going to work. I've talked to some upper management types at these companies and they claim if it wasn't for pay-per-view / on demand, they wouldn't be making any money. I doubt that though.
Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Interesting)
One explanation of Firefly I'd heard was that, while Fox didn't like Joss Whedon, they knew he was too good to allow the competition to have him. So they got him on contract, then ran the show in a terrible slot for its demographic, messed up the order of episodes, and generally, did everything they could to submerge the show without outright killing it.
Re:Who are the good guys? (Score:1, Interesting)
Our government is responsible for this mess because they granted regional monopolies. (Applies to the telephone companies also.) If our government had let the free market reign there would be competition amongst multiple service providers instead of the present "take it or leave it" situation.
Re:Net Neutraility? (Score:3, Interesting)
When a 'business' murders someone, some individual(s) at the company murdered that someone. Those individual(s) are punished.
Huh? I don't know about murder, but corporations certainly commit what amounts to homicide all the time, and seldom if ever do their executards pay any sort of legal price.
Just look at all the bogus drug testing results big pharma used to have dangerous drugs approved for sale. Celebrex , Bextra, Vioxx - all approved for use on the back of fraudulent research. Assuming the crooks running Pfizer and Merck didn't know all along the research was a fraud, they certainly had the money to validate the results of said research before foisting the drug onto an unsuspecting public (it's not like big pharma is going around begging for money). Vioxx alone is thought to have killed around 60,000 people, which makes Osama Bin Laden look like something of an amateur in comparison.
You kill 60,000 people and see if you get away with it.
Well, maybe you would if you spent the estimated $2 billion on lawyers that Merck spent . . .
And this is the reason why no corporation should be allowed to become so large it can't be drowned in a bathtub. Hundreds of corporations are now literally beyond the reach of the law. Which means they can - and will - do whatever they please. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people running these huge corporations are on the whole no different from the power crazed psychopaths who ran the Soviet Union (into the ground, I might add, which is where our country is headed with these lunatics in charge).
Re:Oblig. (Score:3, Interesting)
And how did Fox reward the show that made the network and the reward the fans. By Canceling it without a goodbye episode. Experienced networks knew not to do this. Fox, however, even after all this time, is still an adolescent vunerable to tempter tantrums.
Firefly was a good show with a good concept. It was certainly the amateurish Fox executives that kiled it. Futurama the same thing. I must give them credit for Dollhouse. It was not a long term concept, and the two seasons were long enough to tell the story.
net neutrality (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oblig. (Score:3, Interesting)
It was an incompetent TV exec that wanted to give priority to shows appealing to the female tween market.
You know, its funny that you should bring that up that because I mentioned Firefly to one of my coworkers last year and, after watching a few of the episodes on Hulu with his tween daughter, they liked the show so much that he bought the television series and Serenity on DVD as a birthday gift for her. Firefly was, to paraphrase Leonard Nemoy, one of those "lightning in a bottle" type shows that come around only once in great while and the executives at Fox still managed to frak it all up because they can't tell good programing from a re-run of Survivor: Idiots' Canyon.
Tweens rule the broadcast market
And yet the executives have no idea what they really want to watch. They think they know and they try to market programs to them by telling them what the *should* "like", but they end up appealing only to stereotypes instead of giving tweens what they really want to see.
Re:no one blames the fans? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dollhouse's plotting was more like a compressed Buffy and less like Firefly. The first 5 episodes or so were awful, the middle half of the first season was decent, and the last 1/4 of the first season and the entirety of the second season was amazingly good.
I'm just sayin' - if you didn't stick it out for a bit, you're missing out.
Re:Oblig. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not about programming this is about censorship. Basically if you used their cable to access the internet, the censored your connection whilst they entered into negotiations with a supplier and used that loss of customer access to leverage the negotiations in there favour.
Their customers were of course just screwed over and used as nothing pawns to barter with to Fox's advantage
This is forewarning of exactly why net neutrality is required and why the executives who did this should go to jail. This is exactly what corporate controlled internet access will run like, random blocks and slowdowns, competitors shut out from customers, customer decision forced upon them as they have no choice, political control with unfavourable politicians web sites censored out of existence.
This is not the time for joking, this is the time for an FCC investigation and possible prosecutions.