The Washington Post continues its full-speed-ahead campaign to attack Net Neutrality, both in a published editorial on September 28th and again yesterday on their “Guest Blogger” section in yet another hit piece on the concept of protecting content from the whims of big phone and cable companies.
Tim Karr, a Stop the Cap! reader and a Net Neutrality advocate from Save The Internet called out The Post for an enormous lapse in disclosure when the newspaper “forgot” to inform its readers it has principal ownership of… wait for it… Cable ONE, the nation’s ninth largest cable operator that also offers broadband Internet access.
Cable ONE is notorious for its Internet Overcharging schemes, placing daily limits on customers’ residential broadband accounts, while excluding business customers from usage limits. The company also has a poor privacy track record, conducting NebuAd behavioral targeting tests on approximately 14,000 of its accounts in Alabama for six months beginning in November 2007, unbeknownst to customers who were being tracked. When caught, the company relented.
Karr has called on The Post‘s ombudsman to get the newspaper to engage in full disclosure, and there is plenty to disclose as Karr notes in his piece on The Huffington Post:
The Post editorial, “The FCC’s Heavy Hand,” was gift wrapped for the narrow special interests of the influential phone and cable lobby. And it’s been cited ad nauseum by phone and cable company shills intent on removing the last protection of an open Internet.
The Post’s editors state that Net Neutrality would hurt investment in a “vibrant and well-functioning marketplace” when, in fact, the opposite is true: Carriers working under neutrality conditions have invested tens of billions of dollars in network buildout and improvements.
The Post editorial suffers not only from inaccuracy, but also from lack of disclosure. One of the companies that stands to gain from a world without Net Neutrality is Cable One, an Internet service provider active in 19 states that hopes to pad its already considerable profits by stifling the free flow of online communications. One of the principal owners of Cable One is – you guessed it — the Washington Post Co.
Cable One Chief Executive Tom Might has been an outspoken opponent of Net Neutrality, calling it “a very, very clever D.C. campaign” designed to intimidate politicians “because it sounds so wonderful, like Mom and apple pie.”
Readers should demand that the Post’s ombudsman and editorial page editor clarify this obvious oversight. You can prompt them to respond by sending an e-mail to: [email protected]. Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Post’s editorial page, can be reached at [email protected].
The Post supports every Randian idea yet gets “far left” billing from people like Bill O’Reilly
Vibrant marketplace my butt. CableOne’s ecoomy package tops out at 1GB of transfer per month, its highest-end residential package is a mere 10/1 with a 150GB per month cap (5GB per day, significantly lower than Comcast’s 250GB) and even their lower-end business tiers are capped…at a rather disgraceful 50GB of traffic per month. That said, they do a good job at milking DOCSIS 1.1…they do offer 20/2.5 service as a business tier, albeit probably at a monthly price comparable to a 3 Mbps bonded T1, if their business pricing hasn’t changed recently. When they get a DOCSIS 3.0 based system… Read more »
lol 1GB of transfer a month. Put me on that low of a cap and I can guarantee you it’ll be blown in within a few hours 🙂
5GB a day is impressively bad, wasn’t the Windows 7 beta bigger than that? I mean sure, many (not sure even most would apply here) people won’t break 150GB/month. But 5 gigs in a day is easy. Home usage isn’t constant, it’s spiky.
The Windows 7 64-bit ISO I have sitting in my D drive is ~2.5GB big. That’s how big of a download it was for me. The 32-bit version of Windows 7 is ~2.4GB big as I have that ISO sitting in my D drive as well. For a matter of fact I had to send the 32-bit version of the Windows 7 RC1 Build 7100 to a buddy of mine since he had gotten a key but had problems downloading it from Microsoft back when Microsoft still had the downloads up since he was having issues with his cable modem.… Read more »