Bert wrote: "Yes, except that I differentiate when it comes to property owners subtracting their content. To me, that's annoying but not offensive. It's entirely their right to do so. "Example: does an "open Internet" mean that all of my personal information should be made available to everyone? No, of course. It means that if I write something intended for public consumption, then a third party should not censure what I wrote. "Big difference. So, if Fox and others took down their own content from certain platforms, for reasons that I found to be valid, then so be it. "Google was setting itself up as the one to control *other parties'* content. Not its own content. Think of the media conglomerates content as if it were your own private information. You should have the right to withhold it, as they should have the right to withhold their content. "BTW, I did not buy into the Wikipedia pretense that preventing piracy is the same thing as censuring free speech. As flawed as PIPA might have been, and honestly I didn't dig into it deep enough to know, theft is still theft. If Hollywood spends millions of dollars to produce a movie, there's no excusing that movie being distributed for free without the studio's consent. "And I heard some clueless pundit saying, "Maybe if Hollywood made better movies..." "That's absurd. The whole world wants Hollywood movies. If Hollywood made crappy movies, there would be no problem with theft. "I'm quite certain that if refrigerators could be downloaded from the Internet, Frigidaire would very much object if someone were to distribute their refrigerators for free." Response: Sorry Bert, I must have misunderstood what was being discussed. You speak of private (as in personal) information, piracy, ownership rights, illegal distribution, etc. I thought we were talking about programming that was freely available at webpages for no charge; well, at least freely available to the Windows PC. If we were discussing purchased content, I apologize for going off course. Naturally, I have no problems with ownership and with all the rights and responsibilities thereof. I am just disappointed that when the owners do provide it freely on the open internet, they want to prevent me from consuming it on the device I have chosen to view it on. There are certainly realms where discrimination is valid; I am not sure I consider this one of them. But I don't think my rights are being squashed. If they choose to prevent me from viewing it, so be it. It is almost always their loss, not mine. Dan