The Internet we know today exists only because, until now, there have been no gatekeepers between consumers and service providers. We need to keep it that way.
The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us: “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.
(via vruz)
I’m on a panel tonight with Clay at NYU. Should be interesting.
(via jayparkinsonmd)
(via jayparkinsonmd)
Source: vruz
Net Neutrality and Access to Content
The media industry is whining and pissing off all the Googleheads. Apparently, several networks are blocking access to their content when it’s being connected to via GoogleTV. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures in NYC wrote about this twice over the last week and stirred up some opinions with his viewpoint on net neutrality. Let me preface this with saying that I am not a traditional tech person and my understanding of net neutrality is from a different school of thought than most of the individuals in the tech and online world.
Here is what I comprehend: net neutrality and its proponents advocate that the government and ISPs should remain unprejudiced when it comes to online content -meaning that the government and ISPs can’t interfere with content simply because they don’t like it. For a more lengthy explanation, anyone can head over to Wikipedia and search for net neutrality.
There’s no word from the networks -such as CBS, ABC, and Hulu- as to why there’s the block. There’s also not too much specifically coming from Google camp -yet… but I don’t think this necessarily has to do with net neutrality.
A network blocking access to it’s content when accessed via X-platform has less to do with net neutrality and more to do with web syndication. Syndication has been around for decades in the entertainment world -from radio syndication during the early 20th century to television and film syndication over the last thirty or forty years- and it’s big business. Between selling the rights for a certain show to air in syndication to format sales (e.g. Britain’s Popstars show and American Idol = result of format sale), people make lots of money. Some shows and films even earn more money in syndication than they did during the original airing, such as the original Baywatch. Because of the financial aspects involved, of course networks are going to get fussy about which platforms have access to their content -they want to make sure they get paid!
I don’t suspect that the block for GoogleTV will be a permanent thing, however. Hulu and Netflix have continually grown their inventories, so it’ll only be a matter of time before Google has access, too -it’s only getting so much fuss because it concerns GOOGLE.
