NewsCorp upped the ante, as Stelter reports, by blocking Cablevision customers from accessing Fox shows on the popular streaming video site Hulu. While that maneuver didn't last long, it did represent a pretty clear example of what a major media company can do to violate  net neutrality.

These fights (as Megan Tady of Free Press noted in a piece in Extra! in March) are about giant media companies fighting amongst themselves over money, with the public mostly powerless to intervene.

But when I see Fox getting involved in these fights, I can't help but imagine a battle over the carriage fees that cable companies pay for the Fox News Channel--costs that are passed on to you, the consumer, whether or not you watch Fox News. By some counts you pay three times more for Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity than you do for, say,  MSNBC.

So what if a cable company decided that was too much? And what if Fox retaliated by pulling Fox News Channel from your cable system?  Somehow I think we'd all manage to get through the day.

Or, even more drastically, what if customers could choose whether or not they wanted to pay for Fox News Channel in the first place, through an ala carte cable menu? Fox rakes in millions of dollars every year from viewers and non-viewers alike; it seems like a decent media system would give people the right to not contribute to Murdoch's empire.

Free Press is welcoming (4/28/09) as "a long overdue step in the right direction" the news that "Cablevision announced plans to offer download speeds of 101Mbps and upload speeds of 15Mbps" without charging "usage caps or overage fees" to users. Research director S. Derek Turner explains that the plan

does, however, beg the question why Cablevision can offer fast access with reportedly no caps or overage fees, when others claim such a plan would cause the sky to fall and an exaflood to break the Internet. We hope this new announcement will put an end to the bandwidth bogeyman.

We also encourage companies like Cablevision to think about the other part of the value equation--price. These days, lower prices are just as important as faster speeds.

For some of the history feeding Turner's healthy skepticism about giant media corporations' claims regarding the Internet, read the fair magazine Extra!: "Deregulation's History of Empty Promises: Net Neutrality and the Supermedia Monopolies" (3-4/07) by Jeff Chester.