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Comcast-NBC Deal Accidentally Protects Internet?
jfruhlinger writes "Details of the conditions that the Department of Justice required to approve Comcast's purchase of NBC have emerged today. Blogger Kevin Fogarty looks at the details — Comcast is forbidden from blocking Netflix over its pipes, and must sell NBC shows via iTunes and other similar services — and concludes that Internet access for everybody, including business users, has been protected, more or less by accident."
What this actually does is accept the fact that a corporate merger can specify what is blocked and what isn't. This is actually a dangerous trend for network neutrality, because we are seeing the Justice Department agree with the idea that what is blocked and what isn't is a matter of contractual language between corporations, instead of the inherent right to a free internet.
The article certainly doesn't paint it that way. FTFA:
Still, in approving the deal, federal officials attached dozens of conditions, including several big ones to protect Internet video: Comcast must sell its content to online video services. That gives them access to marquee NBC Universal programming. Comcast can't interfere with Internet video traffic flowing over its broadband network. That means that it cannot prevent its subscribers from accessing Netflix and other Web video services, or slow down traffic from these services to make them jerky, unreliable and hard to watch. Comcast must sell stand-alone Internet access at a reasonable price, without tying it to a cable TV package, to enable cord-cutting. That includes offering a standard 6-megabit-per-second plan, which is fast enough to handle Internet video, for roughly $50 a month.
The phrase "Comcast can't interfere with Internet video traffic flowing over its broadband network." Sounds pretty universal to me. I just hope the author wasn't paraphrasing a document that specified Internet video only from certain providers and not others, i.e. youtube, netflix, hulu, etc.