Slashdot Mirror
Disney Strikes Against Net Neutrality
1 a bee writes "Ars Technica is running a story by Matthew Lasar about how Disney's ESPN360.com is charging ISPs for 'bulk' access to their content. According to the article, if you visit ESPN using a 'non-subscribing' ISP, you're greeted with a message explaining why access is restricted for you. This raises a number of issues: '... it's one thing to charge users an access fee, another to charge the ISP, potentially passing the cost on to all the ISPs subscribers whether they're interested in the content or not.' Ironically, the issue came to the fore in a complaint from the American Cable Association (ACA) to the FCC. A quoted ACA press release warns, 'Media giants are in the early stages of becoming Internet gatekeepers by requiring broadband providers to pay for their Web-based content and services and include them as part of basic Internet access for all subscribers. These content providers are also preventing subscribers who are interested in the content from independently accessing it on broadband networks of providers that have refused to pay.' So, is this a real threat to net neutrality (and the end-to-end principle) or just another bad business model that doesn't stand a chance?"
Could using proxies like Tor assist getting around blocks based on your ISP?
(Whatever happened to all those proposals for 'ala carte' cable?)
There are a number of objections the cablecos raise against a la carte. In the old days, they'd cry that it wasn't technologically feasible to offer individual channels to each household. That was sort of true; analog filters could block out groups of channels, but if they had rearranged channels logically and used the filters to filter out these groups, they probably could have gotten close to a la carte.
Nowadays, the technology issue is moot. Many, many people have digital boxes, making a la carte extremely simple. All modern cablecos are also in the process of switching their analog customers to digital boxes anyway. Many won't even sell you new analog service. However, the cablecos will say that large channels subsidize the smaller ones (of course that's true), and that if they did a la carte, smaller channels couldn't survive. E.g., fewer people would be paying for BET or whatever, so BET would die out. I don't think anyone actually knows how the numbers would turn out, but there is a lot of crap on cable that people would probably be interested in NOT paying for... however, what I think is crap might be interesting to some people (e.g., sports).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I am a Comcast subscriber affected by the NFL network thing and although I missed a couple of games that I expected to be able to watch - I think they are doing the right thing by refusing to stick special interest stuff like NFL Network on basic cable and make people who don't want to watch it pay for it. Would I have liked to see those couple of games that I thought I could watch? Sure. The NFL shouldn't have tried to move them to a crazy new network like that. Should Comcast stick to their guns on this? Absolutely. It's one of the few things that I think they've ever done right.
For the actual issue being discussed here about the ESPN programming - this is indeed the same as the NFL Network deal. I'd prefer to see this ESPN offering die than have my ISP pay extra (and up my bill proportionately). Either make it free to ISPs like content should be, and, if needed, allow individual subscribers to sign up and pay for the content or make it all free and ad supported. Their choice. But none of this back door forcing the ISP to subscribe on my behalf.
I hate to use the stale "I have a black friend" interjectory, but I do have a black friend and asked her opinion of "Song of the South" and the whole Uncle Remus thing. She stated that it was a depiction and a snapshot of historical standards and expectations and should be considered as such. Disney has been around a long time and has evolved with the times. Ultimately, she says it is just fine to her because it is historical in a way and should be preserved as it was in spite of any other political correctness problems.
She's rather intelligent and I appreciated her view on it. However, not all of "our black friends" have such a wide view on things which is rather unfortunate, but it is typical as not all people have a wide view on things. It is most unfortunate that the rather Nazi-like intolerance we call "political correctness" is even permitted at all.
Think again.
Lifetime gets better ratings than the Discovery channel and SciFi.
TruTV gets better ratings than CNN, the History channel or Comedy Central.
Soap, Oxygen, and the golf channel all get better ratings than G4, the military channel, biography, or BBC America.
source
During college, I knew a lot of African immigrants (as in, people who'd come to the US from Africa, either to stay for good, or to get a degree).
Without exception they agreed on one thing: American blacks are racist dumb shits. They couldn't understand where the "dignity" was in rap "music", hip-hop "culture", or the idea of teaching your kids that it's "acting white" to be smart. And they were constantly assailed by American blacks who bugged them about precisely those things - "acting white", not sounding black when they talked, not listening to the "right" music, not being in the "right" major to be black, etc. They were some of the smartest people I knew, and that's because they held themselves to a high standard, worked hard, and didn't think the government owed them a living like 99% of American blacks seem to.
Political Correctness has always been bullshit. I've been to "America's Black Holocaust Museum" in Milwaukee. You know what? It's a piece of shit. Slavery was bad, but the deep South was never anywhere close to Nazi Germany, and they want to hide the truth that blacks sold blacks into slavery, and there were plenty of black slaveowners in America (over 3000 in New Orleans alone according to the 1860 census).
The so-called "history book" you learned from as a kid was a bastardized, sanitized, rewritten version of "history" that had about as much relation to the truth as a made-for-TV "based on a true story" movie.
It's funny, because for the whole first part of your comment, I thought you were talking about this. For those with short attention spans, it's the Top Gear episode where they ravage a toyota truck. For example, they put it on top of a sky scraper they demolish, among other things. The cool thing was, the engineers were only allowed to use a can of wd-40 to get it running again, and it started up without much of a problem through each course.
But you're defending American cars, which are the laughing stock of every Mechanical Engineer I know. I owned 2 Fords, and the mechanics I would sometimes goto would just end the list of problems with, "But you know, it's a Ford." I have a Honda now, and I can tell you, I'm never going back. With the current economic climate, it might not even be an option anyway. Now, they have def caught up in recent years, but to say they surpassed, or even caught up to the Japanese is ridiculous.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am