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NEWS: China Bans Anime from Prime Time TV

On the "net neutrality bill" you mentioned, I'm not quite sure what your point is. Having no first hand information on it, I looked it up and it seemed to be nothing more than an ammendment [sic] to a bill which would have mandated that companies providing internet service be forced to provide those services to any other company free. While this sounds great, it restricts the ability of the provider to expand it's [sic] capabilities by eliminating a source of income (i.e. fees) for special services such as streaming video.

Such an ammendment [sic] would have harmed business and, had it been passed, likely increased the ammount [sic] of money people like you and I pay to use the internet. It had little, if anything, to do with content.

The pettyness of the internet is incredible.

We're supposed to get into an tizzy because "GASP", the Chinese Government has decided that they're not going to allow Japanese cartoons on in primetime!

I mean, who could have predicted something of this scope? Who would have imagined that the knife would cut this deep?

we can talk about Chinese policitics and news reports, because you know that's why we all joined ANIME News Network.com...dedicated to reporting news updates about Japanese cartoons because that makes us so much more mature.

What happen to freedom of speech? I guess it do not apply to China.

And Americans almost riot at having to pay $3 a gallon!!!

I also read that China will also ban The Simpsons. I feel bad for The Simpsons because that's my favorite show of all time. Say it ain't so.

But I sure am glad I'm not in China.

That's what America can do to liberate China: Export more otaku over there.

I don't think The Simpsons has ever aired on Chinese (mainland) television... It'd be helluva surprise for me if it even managed to make it past the Chinese Censors Board.

Richard J. wrote:

On the "net neutrality bill" you mentioned, I'm not quite sure what your point is. Having no first hand information on it, I looked it up and it seemed to be nothing more than an ammendment [sic] to a bill which would have mandated that companies providing internet service be forced to provide those services to any other company free. While this sounds great, it restricts the ability of the provider to expand it's [sic] capabilities by eliminating a source of income (i.e. fees) for special services such as streaming video. Such an ammendment [sic] would have harmed business and, had it been passed, likely increased the ammount [sic] of money people like you and I pay to use the internet. It had little, if anything, to do with content.

I strongly suggest that you learn what Net neutrality is before you shoot your mouth off about how it has nothing to do with content and will "harm business". I think you'll also find that the amendment was about requiring the provision of services free of price discrimination, not free of charge entirely.

Net neutrality is the requirement that ISPs cannot charge different prices depending on what kind of traffic they carry or who they carry it for; all customers have to get the same price scale. That has everything to do with content because content is what they want to discriminate on. At present, if you download 1M of data from YouTube, or 1M from Google, or 1M from Joe's Random Website, it all costs the same to deliver to you, and you pay the same for it.

Some ISPs would like to be able to say to let's say Google, "Give up $10million/year or else we won't deliver traffic from your Web site!". That's even though the ISP's actual customers would be willing to pay for it at the same rate as other traffic... the ISPs want more. From the ISP's point of view, being able to do that would be valuable because there are a lot of companies that want to have an advantage over Google and might be willing to tell the ISP, "Hey, we'll pay you $15million/year to deliver our traffic and not Google's...". The ISPs would just love to be able to have that kind of bidding war. It would suck for network users, though, because we would lose the freedom to choose which search engine we use; instead of using the search engine of our choice, we'd get the search engine that had paid the biggest bribe to the ISP, and we would still be paying just as much for our Internet access even though we no longer really had access to all of the Internet.

Just imagine if the phone company had the "freedom" to charge different customers different prices however they pleased, and make exclusive deals with customers to refuse service entirely to other customers for business reasons. The phone company does not have that kind of "freedom"; it's a good thing that they don't; but ISPs want to do it. Network neutrality, in the present context, means regulation forbidding ISPs from these kinds of shenanigans.

It's not about extra fees for "special services like streaming video". ISPs do not deliver streaming video; they deliver IP packets. Whether those IP packets contain email or video or whatever, they're still IP packets, and they still cost exactly the same to deliver as any other IP packets the same size... to say that ISPs should be allowed to charge more for packets containing video is the same as saying the phone company should be allowed to charge more for phone calls in which you speak Spanish. That is not a special service, and charging more for it isn't a clever idea.

Network neutrality would not "harm business". What it would harm would be dishonest anticompetitive business. That kind of business certainly should be harmed.

Second, the creators seem to be holding back on anything that might be unsuitable for little kids to watch. I’m not saying put a lot of gore into it, but they seem almost afraid to put any of that in. (Gov’t maybe? Who knows.)