Viacom Fails At The Internet

As part of Viacom and Time Warner Cable’s current spat over licensing fees Viacom has resorted to putting a pop-up message on it’s websites targeted towards Time Warner customers.

Unfortunately they somehow include the college network that I help run as if we were Time Warner residential customers. The IP allocation is under our name, the DNS reverse resolves for IP addresses contain our name, we have our own ASN with redundant BGP paths over fiber. And yet because we use Time Warner’s Commercial division as an upstream we are somehow on a list of netblocks that are Time Warner residential customers. This is retarded. I can’t see any possible reason for us to be on that list other than Viacom is blindly looking up BGP paths and punishing anyone whose path travels through Time Warner.

I spammed a few email addresses on Viacom’s side to ask them to remove us in case they decide to escalate this little spat and outright block TWC customers from viewing videos on their website. But considering any useful contacts are usually hidden at such companies I doubt I’ll ever get a response.

In the meanwhile I’m glad most of our students are not here as these message would create a lot of confusion.