Charter, Comcast don’t have First Amendment right to discriminate, court rules
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I have yet to find another IPTV provider that offers tthe first two features mentioned, despite it being possible with ddecade old technology running WinCE (in Centurylink's case).
there was some PR about it being improved this and uniform that.
indeed, the quality is now uniform: complete garbage. really defeats much of owning a good 4k sony :(. i wonder how many additional useless channels they added that no one watches.
at least their set top boxes have abysmally slow UIs.
https://forums.xfinity.com/t5/Non-X1-Service/1080i-channels-...
i looked into Sling TV recently and their lineup has really improved. does anyone have experience with it, quality-wise?
DirecTVNow was flakey the last time I used it on either my RokuTVs or with my Roku sticks. It worked better when I would AirPlay it to my 3rd Gen AppleTV or watch it using the app on my 4K AppleTV.
My wireless connection in the same area as my TVs never dips below 159Mbps so it’s not my bandwidth.
My AppleTVs throughout the house are all connected via gigabit Ethernet throughout my house.
I also noticed it isn’t the same stream sent to Rokus as it was to the AppleTV. The timing would be different.
The trial will focus on whether they can prove it was racism, or some other reason.
I first read your tl;dr as, "The companies can refuse channels, but not if those channels are racist."
I wonder what happens if some emails are found during discovery that say "only X% of our customers are African-American, and X is less than our threshold for whether a channel will be profitable for us"?
I suspect that would be an illegal reason, as, of course, customers of any race might be interested in this channel.
http://entertainmentstudios.com/network/
Frankly they look like cheap knockoffs of existing channels.
- The evidence of discrimination is extremely weak. None the things mentioned ("get off of welfare", "handout", "boy", "change his behavior") is necessarily racism. But the result is not surprising, since the ruling is from the 9th Circuit.
A side note. This kind of law suit properly will increase implicit racial bias, because it is trying to reenforce the idea that welfare and bad behavior only or strongly links to African Americans. See: Even completing a Race Implicit Association Test increases implicit racial bias: https://psyarxiv.com/vxsj7/
The ruling just says that the companies do not have that right. The plaintiff still needs to prove it happened, but that's what the trial is for.
That's literally the entire point of a trial and presentation of evidence.
The Charter/Comcast argument was “it doesn't matter if we were actually discriminating on the basis of race, because the First Amendment allows us to do so, so there's no need for a trial to determine if that's what we were doing (which we weren't.)”
This decision simply says: “The First Amendment doesn't allow you to discriminate by race in the way alleged, so the question of whether you did or did not actually will need to be resolved in court.”
IANAL but I'd imagine bar associations would have a lot of issues with this, wouldn't they?
Sometimes it's not the lawyers but the clients with deep pockets. My friend spent ten years litigating one case over MOSFET patents for an unhinged client. And they lost 95% of the time against another well funded company.
Once there's an actual trial, both parties get to gather evidence via discovery and they'll get to review internal documents about why these decisions were made.
It should also be noted that Charter didn't ask to dismiss the case due to weak evidence. They argued that their first amendment rights bar any claim of discrimination against their editorial decision. The judges wrote that the case "does not seek to regulate the content of Charter's conduct, but only the manner in which it reaches its editorial decisions—which is to say, free of discriminatory intent".
Charter's case for dismissal was weak because they were arguing that their first amendment editorial right meant that no discrimination case could be brought against them. The court rebutted that saying that the case isn't about what they put on their system, but how they decide on it. If they deny all African American owned companies from their system because they don't want African American owned businesses succeeding, that doesn't fall under free speech because it's unrelated to the content - the decision isn't an editorial one, but a discriminatory one.
Whether the evidence of discrimination is weak or not isn't part of this ruling. This ruling is just about whether the first amendment's protection of editorial decisions mean that one can't bring a racial discrimination case even if Charter said, "we won't put any African American owned stations on our system". The ruling seems to be hit the nail on the head: you have editorial rights, but those rights about the content; you're not allowed to deny access because of the race of the person who owns the content.
This wasn't a ruling on the merits of the evidence.
Being openly racist in public is no longer acceptable in most of America, but these types of subtle racism are very common and it’s easy to dismiss them because they’re not explicit.
Coupled with his other comments, though, you might start to view these as 'dog whistles'...
Have you ever actually seen this?
Or, failing that, have you ever read the Alex Haley book "Roots"? or seen the television series based upon? There's an entire scene of protagonist Kunta Kente being whipped savagely as the slave master repeatedly asks "what's your name boy" to dehumanize him and strip him of his birthright and birth-given identity, changing his African name to a white, Anglo-Christian name.
I can't think of a better example than that of how that word came to be weaponized against an entire group of people to the point we have come to now.
"Boy" to black people (hi there, black person here) has a LOT of history of being blatant, unambiguous and pretty darn direct.
Although...
I suppose it's easier if one hasn't lived that life though to rest their laurels on what they "imagine" versus what people like me continually have to point out actually happens because we're the ones living through it.
Your Roots reference is correct but it doesn’t prove your point.
I was born and raised in South Carolina (a town called Moore), and actually went to college in Atlanta, and served in the military in Alabama and later Louisiana, and I recall quite vividly being aggressively called boy from everyone from high school disciplinarians to police officers.
So yes, I have spent considerable time in the southeast. I know quite well where I come from, what's your point?
If you want to sit here and quiz me about my lived experiences as a black man in the southern US, knock yourself out, I suspect most of the answers I give you aren't going to be what you think you want them to be.
I welcome dvtrn to correct me on the matter, as I don't want to speak on their behalf out of line, but taken in context, it seems pretty obvious to me what he was doing was contrasting what someone imagines race relations being like to what he actually lived and experienced is as a black man in the south. No imagination needed on his part.
I think the benefit of the doubt there is earned.
It's quite annoying that it needs to be explained like this, since it should be pretty painfully apparent, but yes.
Sorry but I'm (personally) not particularly inclined to favorably entertain what someone "imagines" about dog-whistle terminology. Their proximity to the ebbs and flows of southern racial 'charm' doesn't hold a candle to what I actually lived through and experienced first hand for 30 years-as a direct recipient of aggressive, racially loaded behavior and speech.
A trial can be opened on suspicion with evidence, then you use the subpoena power of the court to try to prove it.
> This kind of law suit properly will increase implicit racial bias
That’s a pretty big quantitative claim. How high is your confidence in it?
Are you an example of someone whose bias has gone up from reading about this? Or are you basing this off your expertise in what causes shifts in biased people?
> None the things mentioned ("get off of welfare", "handout", "boy", "change his behavior") is necessarily racism.
All of those are explicitly racist when addressing people of color.
> All of those are explicitly racist when addressing people of color.
Agreed.
I read that and cringed pretty hard. For someone to say calling a black man "boy" is not racist is either willfully ignorant to an alarming degree or just plain insincere.
I'm all for differing viewpoints, but let's at least call things what they are. If you're going to be racist, at least own up to it.
It's probably as another commenter alluded below: people are taking this weird position of "I haven't personally lived through it so it must be literally any other explanation" when someone who has direct experience with the type of behavior exhibited points to it happening, live and in living color and says "this is a problem for me as a member of this group".
I couldn't ever in a hundred years imagine telling a blind person who says "this is my experience as a blind person" they're wrong, or what they live through on a day to day basis isn't valid because I, a person with full vision experience it differently.
But here we are. Reading some of the comments in this thread has me cringing just as much as reading the claims alleged in the article [0].
That's immaterial; this ruling isn't weighing evidence and drawing conclusions of fact from it, it's about whether there is a proper justiciable legal complaint with any evidence on the necessary elements. If there is, which this decisions says there is, it is for the trier of fact in the trial court (presumably a jury) to weigh the evidence and draw conclusions of fact.
This is a front-door-of-the-court decision, not a final judgement.