Eurovision tellybods: Yes, you heard right – net neutrality

High-bandwidth service providers have just realised that they are the first to be screwed with traffic-shaping.

Not so much a "musical telly glitterfest" - more of a televised Pride party.

That isn't a bad thing but I always wondered why a show apparently specifically designed to appeal to gay men so often features so many fine looking women.

Whenever someone is for Net Neutrality

...there likely to be a shallow grave, a skeleton in the closet, waking vested interests or shary-cary People of the Left. Or all of them in an unholy alliance.

I just can't decide which subset is active now.

"Clear net neutrality will protect the freedom to impart and receive information without interference."

Bollocks! Creeping gov. censorship has, is, and increasingly will, interfere with such freedoms. And not just in places like Turkey and China. After all, it is for your own good.

"Quick, there's something in it for us now, let's stop being against it for a microsecond until we get our way, then we can forget all about it forever after."

You weren't interested five years ago, then it means that - on balance - you probably won't be interested in five more years.

Project Kangaroo died, you can't force people to pay for your channels individually online, the ISP's won't let you provide your own bias to their content provisions, large content providers like Netflix mean you're either "in" or "out", so you come out for net neutrality now to make sure none of your rivals can do the above successfully after your failed attempts. And then when one of them does anyway, you'll all be vying for your own version of lock-in and bias because THEN you'll be able to get away with it.

It's pretty simple. I don't care who you are. I don't care how you want to sell your stuff. If you have content that's interesting, I want to pick it up wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, whatever device I'm using, whatever ISP I happen to be on, whatever mate's house I'm around. Understand that and you find the value is in your content, not what platform you appear "exclusively" on, or what ISP will agree to bump up your speeds just because you pay them more. What matters is your content, not what bandwagon happens to be heading your way at the moment.

The last ten years should have shown you this. 4od basically give all their content, even historical, away online for nothing. BBC iPlayer only has a time/region restriction because of the way the corporation is forced to operate and that gets recorded/proxied to death even so. Netflix et al are making a viable business just providing your content in a sensible online format. And now places like Amazon are muscling into PRODUCTION, not just distribution.

But some of you fought it all the way to make it as difficult as possible to get your content in reasonable formats and reasonable ways. And now suddenly you want pan-Europe rules to make sure none of your competitors can best you? Maybe if you'd been listening and properly competing on what matters in the first place, they'd be USING THOSE RULES against you instead now.

I don't care who you are. Provide the content I want, for a fair price, without any restrictions (or pseudo-restrictions by giving "advantage" to others). And provide it everywhere - satellite, terrestrial, cable, online, etc. all at the same time.

Sell me content. Just content. Because I'm not interested in "your" preferred ISP, etc. I use Internet companies for my ISP and I use content companies to watch on TV. I use TV companies to sell me a TV in the first place, too. Stick to what your business is supposed to be, and there won't *be* any issues. Try to make your content exclusive or your competitors be at a disadvantage and your lose my content revenue AND I'll change ISP to one that doesn't bias itself. It's not hard.

Actually there are some people in that area who are rather progressive

though those are probably mostly the older ones. After all broadcasting is seen by some broadcasters as a public service. We all pay, either directly or through advertisements, to allow programmes to be broadcast to us all. It's in a way like crowd funding an open source project.

Therefore those people see value in making their content available as open as possible. Some stations are even pushing towards releasing as much as possible under Creative Commons licenses, others just put it online for everyone to download. Compared to the difficulties it takes to convince a large corporation to change its way, many stations are making extremely quick progress towards being a part of an open society instead of just seeing their consumers as a product to sell. Even some commercial stations, which have to sell the attention of their consumers, are learning that they will get more viewers if they just make decent programming, programming the people making television would actually like to watch themselves.