Oscar Night Surprise: Lee Terry helps cable industry kill net neutrality, destroy Netflix, and raise cost of watching movies online; Smith, Fortenberry also vote to crap on movie-lovers

The cable industry has a big problem: Netflix. The 800-lb. gorilla of streaming movies on demand is causing a lot of cable customers to cancel cable movie channels. But Comcast, the Darth Vader of the cable industry and the bete noir of consumers everywhere has figured out a three-pronged approach to sticking it to Netflix.

• First, Comcast places bandwidth caps on Internet service so customers have to pay more if they watch a lot of movies.
• Second, it ransoms its Internet customers by charging Netflix's digital delivery partners (like Level3) extra fees to "access" them — even though they have subscribed to Netflix. This is like the Post Office forcing both senders and recipients to buy postage. Such anticompetitive double-billing for content raises Netflix costs (and eventually its prices to customers) and is a gross violation of net neutrality, which the Obama administration has commendably tried to enforce via the FCC.
• Third, sue the FCC, alleging that it doesn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality! Comcast did this (in a carefully selected jurisdiction) and won. Now the coast is clear for Cox, Time-Warner and other cable companies to act like Comcast.

     Lee Terry enthusiastically enables this corporate rip-off. An apparent tool of the cable industry, he has sided against net neutrality and consumers.
     Watch the video, featuring an outraged Terry waving a fax from the respected anti-virus company, Trend Micro, fuming about its support of net neutrality, and remember that Adrian Smith and Jeff Fortenberry voted with Terry to screw their constituents too.
     (First read the following statement from Trend Micro which pissed Terry off. It will help you tabulate the double-talk made by Terry in his speech. And remember this, because it exposes Terry's biggest lie: Net neutrality doesn't prevent tiered pricing; it keeps ISPs from "throttling" or blocking content from certain websites.)

The FCC's new rules appear to favor net neutrality proponents. They require ISPs to be more transparent about network performance and management; they prevent fixed (as opposed to wireless) service providers from blocking content (for example, sites owned by their competition), and they don't allow ISPs to discriminate against specific applications (such as Netflix, BitTorrent, or Hulu). In other words, you can expect things to pretty much remain as they have been—for now, anyway.

—Trend Micro

If you want to ask Lee Terry why he lied about Net Neutrality eliminating tiered pricing and why he is helping the cable industry destroy Netflix, you can do so here. You can write Jeff Fortenberry here and Adrian Smith here.