The Bloomberg terminal: The cash that subsidizes the news biz

From reading a piece in The Nation. we get to learn about the behind the scenes lobbying and other activity of Bloomberg LP as it fought to not be the loser in a merger between NBC and Comcast.

The company’s tactical goal was to block the Comcast-NBC deal unless the government required the merged company to put Bloomberg TV on a station next to CNBC. Schwartzman explains that it was an extremely “sophisticated” operation. (Greg Babyak, Bloomberg’s in-house lobbyist, referred The Nation’s call for information to Bloomberg’s new top PR official in Washington, Sarah Feinberg, who left the Obama administration to take the position in March 2010. The company declined to comment.)

Basically Comcast most likely would have favored CNBC over Bloomberg’s financial channel. Which alarmed Bloomberg LP. Unless they were put in the neighborhood of CNBC on your cable box that is.

They won out in the end:

But Bloomberg’s lobbying had paid off. The FCC ruled that Comcast would have to “neighborhood” channels together, in the exact same language Bloomberg and its lobbyists had pushed for. “Whenever Comcast carries news channels near each other, it will have to include all independent news channels in all of these neighborhoods,” the FCC announced.

The owner of Privacy.net and Network-Tools.com, Russ Smith, has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, Cisco, Comcast and TRUSTe.

The lawsuit claims that Comcast, Microsoft, and Cisco collected information about Smith’s IP addresses and either put them on a “blacklist” or gave them a poor “Reputation Score.”  Comcast even blocked his communication link with a mail server he operates outside the Comcast network.  The suit claims that in order to collect this information in the first place Comcast, Cisco and Microsoft violated eavesdropping laws.  The suit goes on to claim that Comcast, Microsoft, and Cisco failed to adhere to their privacy policies.  When Smith tried to use the privacy policies of Comcast, Microsoft, and Cisco to correct the spammer accusations the companies balked.  Comcast even told him it didn’t matter what the privacy policy said, he wasn’t getting the information.  He filed complaints with the TRUSTe organization that verifies the privacy policies of Microsoft and Comcast but that did no good.

via Privacy.net sues Microsoft, Cisco, Comcast and TRUSTe – Privacy.net.

From time to time I will utilize the services of network-tools.com for troubleshooting &c. I was rather surprised to find a link to this lawsuit. Needless to say it is an interesting and important one. Good luck to Mr. Smith.

The FCC is going to punish Comast for blocking traffic coming from peer to peer networks.

If the punishment comes through, which is all but assured now, Comcast wouldn’t be fined. But it would be ordered to stop blocking or slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites like BitTorrent, explain to consumers and the commission how it has blocked such traffic in the past, and publicly disclose how it plans to manage its network in the future.

Unfortunatley they won’t be fined. At least they’re being regulated.

I think it’s great that Google is creating so called “net neutrality” tools to monitor ISP’s who are doing wrong.

In response, the Federal Communications Commission announced it would investigate the charges, and in May, a bill was re-introduced into Congress that would rewrite U.S. antitrust law to prohibit network operators like AT&T and Comcast from blocking, impairing, or discriminating against “lawful” Internet content, applications, and services or charging extra fees for “prioritization or enhanced quality of service.”