The Internet philosophy eschews these things, but the implementation simply ignores them. Of course the incumbents desire to reimplement their archaic business models on top of TCP/IP. It's up to us to carry the philosophy and create higher level protocols that are resistant to such things; fiefdom-based HTTP certainly isn't.
Frankly, in my experience it doesn't take a lot to enable multicast and doing it internet wide _shouldn't_ be that big of a deal so we can handle all the streaming of live events with little worry - but the "powers that be" want to restrict everything online and it's frustrating, angering and downright dangerous attitude to have as a defacto "standard".
This time the "powers that be" are playing against the US consumer. I hope that this event sparks some empathy between the US and rest of the World. What many of the US consumers are suffering with the Olympics (broadcasting delay and accessibility), is what the RoW suffers when trying to consume US media (film and TV).
Monetising today's content with an old distribution model is a dead business, and will only help support the consumption of "pirated" content.