Some Comcast Customers Won't Get The Latest Broadband Upgrades Without Buying Cable TV

from the utterly-Comcastic dept

As we've often noted, Comcast has been shielded from the cord cutting trend somewhat thanks to its growing monopoly over broadband. As users on slow DSL lines flee telcos that are unwilling to upgrade their damn networks, they're increasingly flocking to cable operators for faster speeds. When they get there, they often bundle TV services; not necessarily because they want it, but because it's intentionally cheaper than buying broadband standalone.

And while Comcast's broadband monopoly has protected it from TV cord cutting somewhat, the rise in streaming competition has slowly eroded that advantage, and Comcast is expected to see see double its usual rate of cord cutting this year according to Wall Street analysts.

Comcast being Comcast, the company has a semi-nefarious plan B. Part of that plan is to abuse its monopoly over broadband to deploy arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees. These restrictions are glorified rate hikes applied to non competitive markets, with the added advantage of making streaming video more expensive. It's a punishment for choosing to leave Comcast's walled garden.

But Comcast appears to have discovered another handy trick that involves using its broadband monopoly to hamstring cord cutters. Reports emerged this week that the company is upgrading the speeds of customers in Houston and parts of the Pacific Northwest, but only if they continue to subscribe to traditional cable television. The company's press release casually floats over the fact that only Comcast video customers will see these upgrades for now:

"Speed increases will vary based on the Xfinity Internet customers' current speed subscriptions. Those receiving the speed boost will benefit from an increase of 30 to 40 percent in their download speeds. Existing Xfinity Internet and X1 video customers subscribing to certain packages can expect to experience enhanced speeds this month."

As is usually the case, Comcast simply acted as if this was all just routine promotional experimentation (an argument that only works if you're unfamiliar with Comcast's other efforts to constrain emerging video competition):

"We asked Comcast a few questions, including whether it will make speed increases in other cities contingent on TV subscribership. A Comcast spokesperson didn't answer, but noted, "we test and introduce new bundles all the time." The spokesperson also said that the speed increase for Houston is the second in 2018, after one in January. The Oregon/SW Washington speed increase is apparently the first one this year."

In a healthy market with healthy regulatory oversight, either competition or adult regulatory supervision would prevent Comcast from using its broadband monopoly to constrain consumer video choices. But if you hadn't noticed, the telecom and TV sector and the current crop of regulators overseeing it aren't particularly healthy, and with the looming death of net neutrality you're going to see a whole lot more behavior like this designed to erect artificial barriers to genuine consumer choice and competition.

Filed Under: broadband, bundles, cable tv, competition, speeds, tv, upgrades, xfinity
Companies: comcast

Microsoft Defends Putting A Computer Recycler In Jail With Misleading Statement

from the that's-not-what-happened dept

Last week, we wrote a post on the appeals court ruling upholding the 15 month prison sentence for Eric Lundgren. Lundgren gave an interesting interview with the Verge explaining his position on all of this, while Microsoft -- feeling the heat from multiple stories criticizing its role in the prosecution -- put out a somewhat scathing blog post from VP Frank Shaw insisting everyone has this wrong, and presenting an argument that Lundgren was a low down dirty pirate who is pulling the wool over everyone's eyes.

It does appear that Lundgren is overstating things in the interview he gives, especially this part:

It wasn’t a money-making venture. I didn’t make any money doing it. I actually lost money doing it. The goal was to get these [to] refurbishers so they could put them in the boxes and then consumers down the road could repair the problem.

From the details in the case, it clearly was intended to be a money-making venture. Indeed, that's what Microsoft focuses on heavily in its version of the story. It highlights email evidence in the case of Lundgren emailing with his partner/co-defendant in the case where, multiple times, he talks about how they're in business together to make money (and getting frustrated when they weren't actually making money). Here's one example:

Microsoft (and some of its... rather vocal supporters...) argue that this is all proof that Lundgren is full of shit and just a common criminal pirate. But, again, this is confusing things. In our original post, we talked about the difference between the copyright, the software, the license, and the disc. And the distinctions matter a lot. A few years ago, we noted that copyright system supporters have spent decades blurring the lines between "the copyright" and "the content." This plays out in all sorts of funny ways, including whether or not selling a piece of content is considered a sale or a license. As we've pointed out in the past, copyright proponents use a sort of Schrodinger's Download setup, whereby they call it a sale or a license (and deny it's the other) depending on which benefits them more.

In this case, the situation is fairly similar. The fact that Lundgren was hoping to profit from selling convenience to refurbishing/repair shops does not, automatically, mean he broke the law. But many people seem to think that the profit motive alone proves the copyright infringement. But... used book stores are for-profit entities selling copyright-protected materials all the time (without a license from copyright holder), and no one is locking them up as criminals. That's not to say that Lundgren did the same thing as a used bookstore dealer, but merely to point out that the profit-motive alone does not prove infringement.

Here, again, part of the issue is in how stupid copyright makes everything. Lundgren was looking to make money by "competing" against Microsoft, but was doing so by providing a convenient and cheaper solution for recovery discs. But not by infringing on the copyright, but by providing a more convenient way to get the recovery discs (which still required a valid license from Microsoft). So, again, we hit up against the differences between the license, the copyright, the software, and the disc. Microsoft, like many copyright system supporters, wants to blur all four of those issues together, insist they're the same thing, and point to the profit motive and cry "pirate!"

But taking a step back and separating out the components suggests how silly this is. If Lundgren is profiting off of the convenience, but the discs are worthless without a license, then what copyright-related harm has he really done? He may have harmed Microsoft in other ways, but are those harms ones that are protected by copyright, or are they ones that society encourages in the form of competition and innovation? Microsoft claims it's the former, while Lundgren supporters argue its the latter (Lundgren now pretending he never intended to profit muddies the waters for his own argument).

Part of this, of course, is the nature of copyright. It is a monopoly. It makes those who rely on it allergic to any form of competition. So here, where you have competition in the form of convenience, but which does not lead to a "pirated" use of the software, but just a "counterfeit" physical disc that still requires a valid license, there are legitimate questions about why this type of competition is criminal?

In the end, Microsoft and its supporters insist that Lundgren's profit motive ends all discussion. He was making money off of Microsoft software -- case closed. But that's not how copyright policy is designed to work. It is, however, how Microsoft and others such as the RIAA and MPAA, have pushed everyone to believe that copyright is supposed to work. They want you to believe that the copyright and the underlying content are one and the same, and you do anything whatsoever with the underlying content is infringing -- and doing anything with the underlying content that makes money, must automatically be criminal.

It's a sad statement on the state of copyright law that people -- including multiple judges -- seem to accept that interpretation.

Filed Under: competition, convenience, copyright, counterfeits, eric lundgren, frank shaw, profits, recovery disks, recycling
Companies: microsoft

Small ISPs Like Sonic Join The Legal Battle To Preserve Net Neutrality

from the capped-and-throttled dept

The coalition attempting to reverse the Trump FCC's attack on net neutrality continues to grow. INCOMPAS, a trade group representing a number of smaller ISPs like Sonic and RCN, says it has filed a Petition (pdf) in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging the FCC's misleadingly-titled "Restoring Internet Freedom" Order. INCOMPAS joins Mozilla, Vimeo, numerous consumer groups and 23 state attorneys general in claiming that the FCC violated agency policy when it ignored the public, ignored the experts, and decided to give a sloppy wet kiss to the nation's entrenched broadband monopolies.

While FCC boss Ajit Pai frequently tries to claim that the FCC's modest net neutrality protections were a terrible burden on small ISPs, his claims pretty routinely aren't supported by actual facts and hard data (remember those?). In a statement, INCOMPAS members make it clear that giving entrenched monopolies like AT&T and Comcast free rein to abuse a lack of broadband competition in creative new ways isn't going to end well for them:

"The American people do not want the internet to look more like cable, where prices rise, customer service falls, and gatekeepers control what you watch, read and pay...As we watch the AT&T-Time Warner antitrust trial unfolding, it’s clear large ISPs fear a competitive streaming marketplace. Their desire to gobble up content, rather than creating it from scratch, is a sign that anti-competitive interconnection practices and paid prioritization schemes are on the horizon unless strong net neutrality protections are preserved."

And while AT&T and friends like to pretend that the rules derailed their ability to be "innovative," you might recall Sonic CEO Dane Jasper told us how the rules are only really a "regulatory burden" if you're engaging in anti-competitive behavior. And in his own statement, Jasper reiterates the fact that if you're a small business owner that doesn't support net neutrality, you're doing it wrong:

"Net neutrality has always been critical for small businesses and start-ups to compete in the internet age. When the FCC eliminated those protections, it opened the door for large, incumbent ISPs to use their gatekeeper position to put a stranglehold on innovation and competition. As an ISP, Sonic believes every American should have access to fast and affordable internet. The repeal of net neutrality threatens this vision, and we’re proud to support INCOMPAS in challenging the FCC’s disastrous Order in Court."

We're in for a quiet stretch here before the legal fight begins (likely sometime this summer), but when the case begins we should get some interesting additional insight into the numerous, laughable efforts the industry and FCC engaged in to try and downplay massive public opposition to their policy ploy. In the interim, we've noted how ISPs are busy trying to pass fake net neutrality law in the hopes of pre-empting states laws and preventing the 2015 rules from being re-established should the FCC lose in court.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, isps, net neutrality
Companies: incompas, rcn, sonic

Caymus Vineyard Sues Caymus Builders Because It Built Some Buildings For Its Wine Business

from the not-how-it-works dept

Look, trademark law can be confusing. If you're not spending some significant portion of your life either practicing trademark law or writing about trademark law, you might misunderstand how it works. In particular, the requirement for entities to be in the same business or market often times trips people up, with them either not realizing that this provision exists for there to be trademark infringement in most cases, or else not understanding exactly what it means to be competing in the same marketplace.

But my understanding and generosity in this is heavily strained when a winery sues a construction company just because the winery built stuff on its property.

According to a filing in San Francisco’s U.S. District Court, dated March 2, Sonoma’s Caymus Capital is being sued, along with other related parties, by Caymus Vineyards of Napa.

The suit cites the defendants’ “unauthorized and unlawful use of Plaintiff’s famous, incontestable federal trademark registration for the mark ‘Caymus’ and Plaintiff’s corporate and trade name ‘Caymus Vineyards.’”

By way of background, Caymus Capital is related to Caymus Builders, Caymus Residential Recovery, and other related businesses, all of which are also named in Caymus Vinedyards' lawsuit. To be clear, none of these companies are in the wine business. All of them are in the building and construction business. Readers of this site will already be scratching their heads wondering what argument the winery might be making in order to assert that any of this is trademark infringement.

Well, there are two arguments in the lawsuit, both of which are equally flimsy. First, as part of its wine business, Caymus Vineyards asserts in its filing that it builds stuff.

The suit explains that Caymus Vineyards has engaged in building projects on its own properties, primarily in the Napa Valley, and is currently developing a winery, bottling and distribution complex in Solano, where it does business as Caymus-Suisun.

None of which makes it a builder or construction company in the commercial marketplace. Were this to equate to trademark infringement, construction companies would likely have to go unnamed entirely, because every industry has to build stuff to be an industry.

In the complaint itself, Caymus Vineyards also complains that Caymus Builders, which is located in nearby Sonoma, tried to help with the recovery efforts from last year's devastating wildfires that rocked Wine Country.

Since that time, Defendant Caymus Builders LLC has advertised its services along the Napa-Sonoma corridor, presumably as part of the re-building process. … The highly visible signage advertising Defendant’s goods and services alongside vineyard properties will likely cause confusion, mistake, or deception as to the source, affiliation, sponsorship or authenticity of Defendant’s goods and services.

Say it with me now: none of this makes Caymus Vineyard a builder, nor does it make Caymus Builders a winery. All of this complaining is silly, as are claims that anyone is going to confuse the quite famous Caymus Vineyards winery with a construction company.

Hopefully the court will see clear to putting the cork back in this disaster of a trademark suit.

Filed Under: competition, construction, different industries, trademark, use in commerce, wine
Companies: caymus builders, caymus vineyard

Ex-Obama FTC Boss Now Lobbying For Comcast, Trying To Prevent States From Protecting Consumers

from the revolving-door-regulation dept

While the Trump FCC has certainly taken protectionism, corruption and cronyism to an entirely new level, it's important not to forget that Trump and Ajit Pai are just products of the country's long established bipartisan dysfunction when it comes to revolving door regulators, and it's going to take more than just ejecting Trump and Pai to repair the underlying rot that has allowed them to blossom.

Case in point: former Obama FTC boss Jon Leibowitz, who has long professed himself to be a "privacy advocate," has spent much of the last few years lobbying for Comcast while at Davis Polk. That has included making a myriad of false claims about ongoing, EFF-backed efforts to protect broadband consumer privacy in California.

In an endless wave of op-eds (where his financial conflicts of interest are almost never disclosed to the reader), Leibowitz has been busy insisting that rampant ISP privacy abuses are a "nonexistent problem," and that strong state and FCC oversight of ISPs are unnecessary because the FTC will somehow rush in to save the day in the wake of efforts to neuter the FCC, kill net neutrality, and embolden massive anti-competitive telecom duopolies.

We've already outlined in detail why that's a horrible take here. More specifically, the FTC lacks rule-making authority, and can only act against ISPs if behavior is clearly proven to be "unfair and deceptive," something ISPs can usually wiggle out of on the net neutrality front (we weren't throttling a competitor, we were protecting the safety and integrity of the network!). The FTC's also understaffed, under-funded, and over-extended. And oh, did we mention that AT&T has been busy in court trying to obliterate whatever authority over ISPs the FTC does have?

Leibowitz (like most ISP lobbyists pretending to be objective analysts) "forgets" to mention that.

With more than half the states in the nation now considering some flavor of net neutrality and privacy rules in the wake of federal apathy, Leibowitz is also busy trying to help Comcast scuttle privacy and net neutrality in other states like Massachusetts. Massachusetts, with the backing of dozens of lawmakers, is contemplating new net neutrality rules that would effectively mirror the ones Comcast lobbied the FCC To dismantle last December.

Leibowitz's oppositional testimony this week in front of state leaders included claims that net neutrality somehow hampered broadband industry investment, an ISP-lobbying claim routinely debunked by just looking at ISP earnings reports, SEC filings, and countless CEO statements:

"According to his prepared testimony for a hearing before the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, Leibowitz said he recognized "the sky did not fall" when the FCC, during the Obama Administration, reclassified ISPs as Title II common carriers. But he said that reclassification did have costs to consumers, including diminished deployment of broadband, according to the FCC, as well as removing broadband consumer protection from the FTC's jurisdiction."

Again that diminished deployment never happened. ISP CEOs admit as much. Meanwhile, the "sky did not fall" because the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules haven't even technically been repealed yet (that's expected to occur sometime in April). Even then, ISPs aren't expected to truly even start testing their newfound anti-competitive freedoms until they're sure the FCC (with ISP help) wins their looming legal battle. Even then ISPs may not truly be comfortable behaving badly until they're sure tougher state and federal rules are pre-empted (that's why they're pushing for a fake, loophole-filled net neutrality law.)

Knowing that states might fill the consumer protection vacuum, both Verizon and Comcast lobbied the Trump FCC to include language in their net neutrality repeal trying to ban states from protecting consumers (from net neutrality or privacy violations). And while Leibowitz tried to warn Massachusetts leaders that they might run afoul of the Trump FCC if they try to protect consumers (oh no!), that ignores the fact that legal experts say the FCC abdicated its authority on this front when they decided to back away from classifying ISPs as common carriers.

Again, dozens of individual state privacy and net neutrality protections aren't ideal, but that's something Leibowitz's client Comcast should have thought about before lobbying to demolish popular and modest federal level privacy and net neutrality protections. The fact that ISP lobbyists still cling to false claims that net neutrality "demolished sector investment" speaks volumes as to the integrity of their arguments. Meanwhile, at some point media outlets in the States need to wake the hell up to the harm caused by publishing lobbyist op-eds without disclosing authors' financial ties to industries they represent.

Filed Under: broadband, california, competition, ftc, jon leibowitz, lobbying, massachusetts, net neutrality, privacy
Companies: comcast

More Colorado Towns Vote Down A Comcast State Law Hamstringing Broadband Competition

from the roll-your-own dept

For years we've discussed how incumbent ISPs like Comcast have spent millions of dollars quite literally writing and buying shitty, protectionist laws in more than twenty states. These laws either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, or in some cases from even engaging in public/private partnerships. It's a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too: they get to refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it.

ISPs and beholden lawmakers shoveled these bills through state legislature without much challenge. But as deployments like Google Fiber began highlighting how these laws actually harm efforts to improve competition (especially restrictions on public/private partnerships, essential in lower ROI areas), passing such legislation has become more challenging. In some states, that has forced companies like AT&T to try and hide competition-killing provisions in unrelated traffic or other bills.

This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. With frustration mounting over sub-standard broadband and awful customer service, more than 86 cities and towns and more than 30 counties have already overturned the law as it applies to their localities.

While votes this week are still being counted (warning: adblock blocker) dozens more colorado towns are expected to follow suit this week. That includes Fort Collins, which this week voted to approve $142 million in revenue bonds to help build its own broadband network (an idea Comcast lobbyists tried to ban the city from even discussing). Six additional towns considered ballots to ignore the state law this week, and the vote totals so far aren't even close (locals tell me yes 1568 to 347 in Firestone, Yes 634 to 69 in Frisco).

Locals, shockingly, are increasingly tired of broadband monopolies:

"If an area doesn’t have reliable, good broadband access and availability, that area is not going to thrive,” said Jud Hollingsworth, a town trustee with Lake City, a mountain town of several hundred residents that is among the most remote in Colorado. “Residents here are saying if they could have some competition in that area, they would welcome that."

Across the state in Limon, town manager Dave Stone said residents in his eastern plains community have been less than pleased with the internet service they get now.

“We continually hear from people who have difficulty getting the broadband service they need,” he said. “They certainly feel there’s a need for competition in town."

Again, ISP lobbyists (and the fauxcademics, consultants and think tankers paid to parrot ISP positions) have tried to argue that municipal broadband is a vile socialist cabal that threatens private industry and always results in failure. But that's not only patently untrue, it obfuscates the fact that these towns and cities are only exploring this option after the telecom sector failed for more than a decade to offer fast, affordable service thanks to monopoly power and regulatory capture.

Comfy with their regional monopolies propped up by cash-compromised lawmakers, ISPs have refused to upgrade towns and cities they don't feel will be profitable enough, quickly enough. The Trump FCC's nonsensical "solutions" to these long-standing issues (killing privacy protections and net neutrality) have only made the problem worse, which, in turn, has only made the idea of community-owned and operated broadband networks more appealing than ever:

"(Colorado Broadband Office Executive Director Tony) Neal-Graves said some municipal leaders in Colorado were “spooked” by the FCC’s December ruling and want to make sure they have more than just one choice of internet provider, no matter where they might be located in the state."

Much like the state-level backlash on net neutrality, it's another example of how cocksure ISP lobbyists didn't quite think things through before waging their state-to-state war on competition, common sense, and public welfare.

Filed Under: colorado, competition, municipal broadband
Companies: centruylink, comcast

Cable Companies Warn In Court That AT&T Time Warner Merger Will Be Absolutely Terrible For Competition And Consumers

from the Synergies,-yo dept

AT&T and the Department of Justice are ramping up their legal arguments in court as the DOJ tries to block the company's $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. While some question the DOJ's real motives in the case (Trump ally Rupert Murdoch has been lobbying against the deal for competitive reasons for a year), consumer advocates agree that the deal will be horrible for consumers and competitors alike. AT&T already has a long, epic history of anti-consumer behavior, and critics charge the greater leverage will only let AT&T jack up licensing costs for competitors trying to compete with AT&T's own streaming services.

To glean support for its unpopular merger, AT&T offered a special deal to 1,000 of its competitors. According to AT&T's proposal, if competitors agreed to support the merger, the company promised send any price disputes with other cable companies to an outside arbitration process. Most competitors were pretty clearly not impressed:

"But thus far, only 2 percent of AT&T's rivals have expressed support for that plan, according to lawyers for both sides. The revelation came as AT&T and the Department of Justice faced off in court Tuesday, the second day of a trial whose consequences will reverberate across the economy. Of the 1,000 letters sent by AT&T to competing TV providers in November notifying them of the proposal, just 20 received a positive response, according to company and government lawyers."

Many of those same competitors have been called to testify against the merger on behalf of the DOJ, and their comments this week were not what you'd call positive. Dish and its subsidiary Sling TV, for example, were quick to argue that AT&T simply has no incentive to offer reasonable licensing terms to streaming competitors like Sling once the deal's done:

If the merger goes through, Time Warner’s incentives change, according to Schlichting. It could demand higher rates or onerous terms, such as requiring Sling to buy more channels, and would be less likely to compromise, he said. Either Dish’s costs would go up, or if there’s no agreement and Turner channels “go dark,” the company would lose subscribers who would likely switch to DirecTV or its DirecTV Now online service, Schlichting argued. Gaining subscribers would be more lucrative for AT&T than programming fees, he said.

“I just don’t see them having any motivation to move” to get to a deal, he said of Time Warner.

Cable competitor Cox Communications had similar words of warning, noting that AT&T's promise for outside arbitration was a "little bit of gamesmanship," and that losing access to needed content soon to be owned by AT&T could "significantly impact the viability of our business model." DOJ lawyers have warned that if the AT&T Time Warner deal is allowed to proceed, consumer bills could skyrocket to the tune of $436 million annually. Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term net neutrality, put things rather succinctly in a New York Times piece this week:

"The (DOJ $436 estimate underestimates) the full costs of this merger to the American public. What we really have here is a brazen effort to prolong the life of a dying business model — “full-service” pay TV — by making “cord-cutting” more expensive, and thereby strangling a revolution in internet television that remains in its toddlerhood. Even worse, greenlighting the deal could set off a domino effect."

While some of these potential pitfalls can be stymied by conditions, meaningful conditions haven't been a strong suit for either party of U.S. governance. More often than not, the companies merging volunteer their own conditions routinely made up of "goals" they would have accomplished anyway. While politicians pretend to be holding these companies' feet to the fire for political brownie points, enforcement is routinely non-existent. As a result, merged companies (especially in the traditionally regulatory capture protected cable and broadband industries) still somehow fail to adhere to them.

Years go by, everybody forgets, the harms of such vertical integration are either ignored or downplayed; rinse wash and repeat. Of course given that AT&T is on the cusp of successfully killing net neutrality, the end result of this merger could prove extra problematic. AT&T has been given the green light for an ocean of "creative" anti-competitive behaviors that could make life particularly difficult for streaming competitors, whether that comes in the form of zero rating AT&T's own content (while still counting competitor's traffic against AT&T caps), or by simply prioritizing the content of AT&T or its deepest-pocketed allies.

In short, the deal is likely to jack up the costs for competitors (which get passed on to you) at the same time we remove valuable safeguards protecting the health of the internet and the ability to compete on a semi-level playing field. All so a company with a long, long history of behaving badly can have more power over multiple markets. What could possibly go wrong?

Filed Under: antitrust, cable, competition, merger, tv
Companies: at&t, cox, dish, time warner

Cannes Bans Netflix Films From Competition Because The Internet Is Bad (Or Something)

from the get-off-my-lawn dept

Cannes this week declared that the long-running festival would be banning streaming services like Netflix from being able to win the Palme d’Or. That said, festival leaders weren't able to offer a coherent reason why. Festival boss Thierry Fremaux apparently tried to offer something vaguely resembling an explanation to a variety of different news outlets, but wasn't particularly successful. Most of the arguments made by Fremaux to the press had something to do with Netflix being different (gasp) from the traditional film industry production and criticism model:

"The Netflix people loved the red carpet and would like to be present with other films. But they understand that the intransigence of their own model is now the opposite of ours,” Thierry Fremaux said."

The heart of the ban appears to be a fusion of protectionist concerns about how streaming could harm the traditional French film industry and brick-and-mortar theaters (aka: fear of competition). France has a cultural exception law that requires a percentage of all box office, TV and streaming revenues be used to finance homegrown and foreign films. That law also forces a very outdated and obnoxious release window: namely a 36-month delay between theatrical release and streaming availability. Streaming providers' disdain for such artificial and arbitrary restrictions has been ruffling feathers for years.

In other words, this is really just the same old story about people making silly decisions because of fear of something new disrupting legacy business models that may not work as well in the modern era. But because Cannes just can't come out and admit that, we instead got a heavy dose of disdain for the internet in general:

"Fremaux said the while new players like Netflix and Amazon are enabling directors to make big budget films, they are creating “hybrids” that aren’t TV and aren't quite film. “Cinema [still] triumphs everywhere even in this golden age of series,” he said. “The history of cinema and the history of the internet are two different things."

It's 2018 and that's not entirely true anymore but who cares, get off my lawn!

Cannes has previously banned made for TV movies to ensure a certain quality bar in competition. The organization appears to be using that ban to justify banning Netflix, despite the fact that Netflix is now spending billions on producing its in-house, award winning fare. Because many of these films only saw limited runs in theaters (or no run at all) doesn't automatically equate to low quality, and banning streaming services from awards isn't likely to magically save an industry unwilling to evolve.

Of course this disdain for all things new isn't solely a French phenomenon. Stephen Spielberg recently stated that Netflix films shouldn't be allowed to win Oscar awards, though here too you'll notice that the justifications are arguably flimsy, with an attempt to equate "streaming" with inevitably low quality:

"Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” he told ITV News. “You certainly, if it’s a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar. I don’t believe films that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination."

Why not? Who knows! If the content is awful it will get rejected from such competitions anyway. And trying to fend off streaming at this point is like trying to slow the flow of a river with just your hands. The move is pretty clearly an effort by Fremaux to project a certain standard of excellence (he also announced that selfies would be banned at this year's festival), but the message it's actually sending the world is more of the "I'm a Luddite" variety.

Filed Under: cannes, competition, disruption, films, innovation, movies, protectionism, streaming, thierry fremaux
Companies: cannes film festival, netflix

Best Buy Bans Huawei Phones Despite Zero Public Evidence Company Spies On Americans

from the hypocritical-protectionism dept

A few years back, you might recall that there was a period of immense government and media hyperventilation over allegations that Chinese hardware vendor Huawei spied on an American consumers. Story after story engaged in hysterical hand-wringing over this threat, most of them ignoring that Chinese gear and components are everywhere, including in American products. So the government conducted an 18 month investigation into those allegations and found that there was no evidence whatsoever to support allegations that Huawei spies on Americans via its products. One anonymous insider put it this way at the time:

"We knew certain parts of government really wanted” evidence of active spying, said one of the people, who requested anonymity. “We would have found it if it were there."

What inquiries into this subject do tend to find is that U.S. networking companies like Cisco, terrified by the added competition from Chinese network vendors, are really effective at scaremongering gullible and non-tech savvy lawmakers into supporting a protectionist stance against Huawei. The hypocrisy of "protectionism is only bad when somebody else does it" is compounded by the fact that Snowden docs revealed that the NSA hacked into Huawei starting back in 2007 to steal source code and...plant backdoors in Huawei gear to spy on people around the world.

In an ideal world, numerous lessons would have been learned from this whole experience.

But this is America! Fast forward to the last few months, and the narrative of Huawei as a villainous, unchecked Chinese spying apparatus is once again all the rage, with nobody apparently heeding the lessons from just a few years ago. As we've been noting, both AT&T and Verizon (who not only help the NSA spy on everyone but have been caught giving advice on how to best tapdance around privacy and surveillance laws) were recently pressured to kill looming business deals with Huawei based on unsubstantiated, unpublished and vague allegations of spying.

While Huawei has some presence here (they helped Google build the Nexus 6P), they'd been making some solid inroads at AT&T and Verizon on deals that would have let them strike major smartphone partnerships. AT&T was just hours away from announcing one such deal at CES earlier this year, when it suddenly announced it would be scrapping the deal. AT&T didn't say why, but later reports indicated it was because of pressure from a handful of lawmakers on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees (again, AT&T has oodles of NSA contracts it would obviously like to protect).

Again though, nobody was able to offer concrete evidence of said spying, nor did anybody seem to remember we just went through this a few years back and found no evidence of Huawei wrongdoing. Fast forward to this week, when Best Buy announced it too would be banning Huawei products from its store shelves (warning: obnoxious autoplay video):

"Best Buy, the nation's largest electronics retailer, has ceased ordering new smartphones from Huawei and will stop selling its products over the next few weeks, according to a person familiar with the situation. Best Buy made the decision to end the relationship, the person said. "We don't comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons," said a Best Buy spokeswoman."

Few news outlets seem to spend too much time worrying about the fact that these decisions are being made completely non-transparently, with no hard evidence being offered to justify them. Again it's not impossible that Huawei helps the government spy, but given the volume and duration of these accusations, you'd think that somebody would be able to drum up a shred of public evidence supporting them. Regardless, protectionism is playing a pretty major role here one way or another, and you'd be hard pressed to find any American tech press coverage that so much as breaches that already documented reality.

While it's obvious that China spies on America, it certainly has an ocean of ways to do so outside of Huawai. Chinese hardware is utterly everywhere in America, including inside of most U.S.-made networking gear and smartphone hardware. And Americans also have a voracious appetite for internet of broken things devices, most of which lack even the most rudimentary privacy and security safeguards. Spying on us at scale doesn't really even require Huawei's help. We volunteer ourselves routinely for the duty courtesy of our collective obsession with "smart" televisions and other easily-hacked devices.

It's routinely amazing how the same individuals and organizations who preach endlessly about the need for healthy, open competition and malign China endlessly for protectionism, are suddenly OK when we're the ones dressing up protectionism under the thin veneer of national security. Similarly there's an endless roster of individuals engaged in all manner of face-fanning when foreign governments spy on us, but don't so much as blink when it's revealed we illegally hack into companies to plant backdoors or intercept U.S. networking gear deliveries for the same purpose.

And again, this hypocrisy is routinely made worse by a U.S. (and Canadian) tech press that's utterly oblivious to how nationalism skews their reporting and allows them to be easily manipulated by companies simply eager to avoid competition. If you're a tech reporter it is, shockingly enough, still your job to provide hard data--even when reporting on murky allegations against "enemies of the state" you may not personally be a fan of.

Filed Under: china, competition, moral panics, surveillance
Companies: best buy, cisco, huawei