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You Have The Freedom… to Watch What We Tell You

Posted on May 29, 2007
Filed Under Politics, Web 2.0 (Observations) |

Yes there may be a lot of us who understand the whole problem of net neutrality, and the slow diminishing of human rights in the UK, and that complain about cpyright extension, and ‘friendly atmosphere’ interviews before you get a passport, but until this stuff jumps up and bites people, you’re not going to get the masses motivated to do anything.

The Internet as a Series of Tubes
The Internet as a Series of Tubes

That thought sprung to mind again today when Jason Calacanis did the BlogBitch to ESPN and their relationship with TimeWarner (in short, ESPN are asking to pay up, or their customers don’t get ESPN on the web). Why bother waiting for the US Congress to force through the Net Neutrality (ha) whenyou can just go about creating precendent now, and use that to leverage every other ISP/Pipe Provider?

The UK in in a similar situation with the ongoing battle of wills between Virgin Media (formerly NTHell NTL) and Sky. Both of them are in the situation where they are pipe providers and content providers, doing their level best to maximise payments for their content from the opposing company, while trying to minimise what they have to pay to get their content down the other pipe. The fact that both of them need each other is at least keeping them at the negotiating table, but imagine if Virgin Media didn’t have to rely on Sky to carry their channel packages; the gloves would really be off. So in this case the UK canbe thankful for small mercies.

But all this could very well blow up soon, as networks throttle the pipe size at peak times, taking payola to let through YouTube with no restircitions, while ‘profile shaping’ legitimate P2P services such as Channel 4’s On Demand service. At some point, people are going to work out what’s going on. And the sooner that happens the better. Because then, anything can happen. After all, introduce one bad tax (the Poll Tax) and the subjects of this island have proven they can take down a Prime Minister…

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