The title really says it all. This company, like the massive telephone monopolies of old, wants more than anything to be the only kid in the internet/TV/phone sandbox, and so far they are doing a fairly good job of it. They regularly block content that they don’t approve of, all the while giving lip-service to the concept of net neutrality. And today, through the dust-kicking of another company, they have officially broken me from my stoicism and I feel the need to rage, both to get some of this frustration out of me and to make more people aware of what is going on.
For reference, mostly because they’ve consolidated everything so well, I’m going to offer my own thoughts around this Huffington Post article. They split everything up quite nicely, so I’ll follow Mr. Karr’s order of points. If he should find this little post and wish my thoughts to go away, I will simply link the article. In fact, I strongly suggest you read Mr. Karr’s article and just skip the rest of mine. Or read it and come back. I’ll wait.
1) The Netflix thing — At first glance this looks to be a minor thing. It looks like a simple charge between networks, something that isn’t horridly uncommon, but the timing of it is incredibly sketchy. Comcast swung its banhammer in the direction of the new streaming host for Netflix, essentially saying “if you want to keep our 17 million customers, you’ll pay us for the privelidge”. With that kind of money involved, especially with the introduction of Netflix’s streaming-only plan in the US, Level 3 had absolutely no choice in this matter. They would lose orders of magnitude more money by not paying Al Comcast.
2) Cable modems — Comcast hates when customers buy cable modems. I ran into that when I was with Comcast. Even when you purchase them through Comcast, it’s about $100 dollars (or at least was several years ago) and that includes a reasonably steep markup. Comcast “encourages” its subscribers to rent the cable modem, mostly by not making it particularly obvious that one CAN buy a modem. Now, there have always been a very small number of third-party companies making cable modems without Comcast’s blessing. However, to do this, one has to, basically, get Comcast’s permission to be able to test your product before selling it to consumers. No one wants a modem that doesn’t modem. I used to think it was hard to get a driver signed by Microsoft, but what Comcast has been doing to Zoom modems is blatantly anti-competitive.
3) NBC Universal — Not much to say here. It’s never a good idea when content creators and content distributers are the same people. Picture the Disney Vault situation, only worse cause Comcast is quite a bit more evil than Disney. And I can’t believe I just said that.
4) Comcast hates the very idea of free speech — This is not unexpected. We all remember when they throttled peer-to-peer connections, infuriating most World of Warcraft players and the other legitimate users of P2P protocols. The pirates didn’t care much; they found their way around the issue very quickly. But for Comcast to block access to a Harvard, MIT, and FCC symposium on net neutrality? Never piss off the academics, especially the ones with money. I’ve made no secret of my thoughts on free speech. I’m one of those, “I think your specific brand of speech is idiotic but I do believe you have every right to spout that idiocy so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone” people. So this last issue is what bothers me the most. Comcast tends to censor those things that are harmful to itself. Now, if the things they block are false, then they have a right to stop people who are lying about the way they do things. However, it’s often said that the best defense against a libel charge is truth. If people are saying TRUE things about Comcast’s idiocy, Comcast has no legal right to censor it. There is a lot more grey involved with censorship and how much speech is exactly free, but that’s for another time and place.
This rant has managed to go on quite a bit longer than expected, but sod it I’m mad. Let’s all put our collective banhammers together and start a war against Comcast and it’s evil. Then we’ll be shiny … at least until the next evil comes along.