Argentine Government Orders Major ISP To Close

Doctor Jonas writes "Argentine ISP Fibertel has been barred from continuing operations because of the dissolution of their status as a company after they were absorbed by Cablevisión of Argentina, now part of media conglomerate Grupo Clarín. The Minister of Planning, Julio de Vido, announced the measure, and said it was Grupo Clarín's own doing by having shut down the Fibertel company and turning it into a commercial brand, and that ISP licenses are not transferable after acquisitions from one company to the other. The Argentine opposition said the move was another attack on Grupo Clarín's standing and another part of the feud between them and President Cristina Fernández and her husband, former president Nestor Kirchner. Cablevisión has promised to go to the courts to overturn the decision, and the opposition seeks to protect Fibertel's continuing operations through a bill in Congress. More than a million households and businesses would need to change ISPs in merely 90 days, possibly strengthening the internet provisioning dominance of both Telefónica (subsidiary of the Spanish Telefonica) and Telecom."

Re:News For Nerds

[mfarah]

Can anybody or the editors explain the relevance to "my rights online" of this story,

Politics can have effects on all of us, even if we don't care about politics.

Re:News For Nerds

[alexborges]

There are slashdot readers in most of the world. And yes, the world IS not the usa. And by the way, just so you know, telefónica IS part of the third largest financial group in the world. Welcome to earth, usaian

So what?

[cachimaster]

I'm one of the affected million and I will have to change ISPs. Fibertel used to throttle youtube all the time, but apart from that the service was good, if a little expensive. They are part of a huge news-controlling monopoly, broke the law, and they got what they deserve. There are many choices of broadband internet over here, so I basically don't give a sh*t.

Wrong URL

[Anonymous Coward]

The URL is not Fibertel.com. Is fibertel.com.ar

Re:So what?

[santix]

I totally agree. In this case the government just applied the law. It is questioned because the measure happened to be against a big group (they own a lot of media; TV, newspapers, radios...) which is opposed to the actual government. But that ISP was providing its services without a license totally aware of it. So in this case justice was served.

Re:So what?

[Nicopa]

Grupo Clarín owns the national major newspaper, and seems to control the 2nd major one. It owns TV channels in every town and city, and in many cities is the only cable operator. It controls the only newspaper paper plant in Argentina and uses prices to undermine other newspapers.

As I explained in another comment, this is really about the government trying to stop a new merger, because Clarin had acquired the 2nd largest cable company in Argentina. The govt rejected the merger, but Clarín went ahead and dissolved the company, creating for itself an illegal situation (because the ISP license belonged to the old comany, which is now dissolved).

We are here in very interesting times regarding the role of journalism, and the fight agains media giants...

Re:I live in Argentina

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Sorry to reply to myself, but I forgot about something:

The link in the article is wrong. Fibertel's webpage is fibertel.com.ar. Right now, when you enter the homepage, there is a clickthrough message before reaching the index that says they are going to continue providing their service, and that they are doing everything they can (legally) to continue providing their service.

Re:So what?

[goruka]

I'm argentinian too, (and I'm affected) and let me fill up fellow slashdotters a little more on this. Grupo Clarin is a _huge_ media monopoly and the second largest company in the country. They own pretty much everything, every of the most relevant newspaper, cable TV company, Air TV signal, radio, broadband, media producers, etc. Until recently they have also all the monopoly on broadcasting all soccer games (soccer is big here). They slowly acquired monopoly status thanks to laws passed during dictatorship times (which they favored).

Grupo Clarin's reach is so large that they control most of the public thinking, and many times helped coups or to overthrow presidents that didn't get along well with them. They used to be in a good relationship with the current government until a few years ago, when something mysterious happened and they became enemies (it's not certain what happened, but most likely that the government blocked them access to entering them into telephony, by favoring other companies, so they couldn't expand their monopoly). As a result, every single day the largest newspapers, TV channels, etc attack the government in any way they can, fabricating negative scenarios, taking government claims out of context, etc, reducing significantly the positive image of the president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

The government, in exchange, started passing several anti-monopoly laws to break Grupo Clarin, revoking their licenses, taking their grants for soccer broadcasting away, as well as prosecuting them for the crimes they committed during dictatorship.

As a personal view, I feel my fellow argentinians are too blinded by the two-way hate, and too worried about taking sides, that don't realize this mutual destruction between the media monopoly and the current government (one of the most corrupt governments in our history) is probably very beneficial for the country, as it's like killing two birds with one stone..

Some thoughts from Argentina

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit of extra info from another argentinian. Don't expect to be enlightened though, since the situation is basically a gigantic clusterfuck with no easily discernible good or bad guys.

Grupo Clarín is Argentina's largest media conglomerate. It doesn't have a monopoly in anything because there is lots of competition, but it is the 500-pound gorilla in all the areas it competes in and in most of the markets it invests in. The largest newspaper (Clarín), one of the biggest tv networks, one of the largest cable networks, one of the largest cable ISPs (the one mentioned in the summary), the largest newspaper printer, etc. Whatever media-related thing you can name, they have some stake on it.

Grupo Clarín is also politically opposed the the current administration, the Kirchners (current president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and former president Nestor Kirchner), and the feeling is mutual. The battle between them has been raging for a few years, but in the past few 10 or so months things have become wild (I'd talk about sending the police to strip-search the sons of the owner of Grupo Clarin, but that would really make this go off-topic).

Last year a new law governing media and communications was passed on the last few days before the Kirchner's lost the majoritary control of Congress. The law made sweeping changes to the process of getting a license for broadcasting, ostensibly to avoid monopolies, but in practice setting things up so that the Government alone chooses who gets a license and who doesn't. Given the size of Grupo Clarin, some of the new license limits would mean it would have to forcibly drop many markets, or split itself to satisfy the new requirements. Moreover, given its enmity with the current administration, it's obvious Clarin would be hard-pressed to get more licenses in the future. The law has a lot of good points, but this much is evident to everybody, though whether you interpret it as good (since it would weaken some businesses large enough to be close to monopolies) or bad (since the government gets to choose who has a voice and who doesn't) varies.

That the government is ordering this Grupo Clarin owned ISP to close is just the latest spat in this long fight. One one side you have the government's arguments: that the license has caducated, and so they are merely enforcing the law, and that Grupo Clarin is a big bad monopoly anyways. On the other side, there's the fact that the ISP has been operating under this license for about six years and that the issue only comes up now, after the current government modified the laws, arguably as part of an ongoing battle against the very people they are now attacking with them.

On the technical side, there's the issue of what to do with the many users of this [very large] ISP. The other large ISPs can't possibly take this many new users in a year, much less in a 90-days timeframe. Moreover, this is a country-wide ISP; there are places where there simply isn't another choice (which many users have already pointed out).

To make things more interesting, there's the fact that the other large ISPs are the duopolic companies mentioned in the summary. They offer telephone and internet services, but not cable, and cable companies can also offer internet services, but no telephone, as the so-called triple play is not allowed here (so much for wanting to fight monopolies, I guess). The telephone companies inherited the state's phone lines. They will be the big winners in this whole thing, and it seems they have ties to the Kirchners as well.

I try to be neutral in giving you this info, but I guess you can see I tend to lean on the side of Grupo Clarin at least on this one. I'm less afraid of a big bad conglomerate whose products I can stop buying if I want, than of a government who can decide whether or not I should be allowed to hear what someone wants to say.

Re:So what?

[tannnk]

You may want to take a look at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fern%C3%A1ndez_de_Kirchner [wikipedia.org] "She won with 45.3% of the vote, a 22% lead over her nearest rival. This was the widest margin obtained by a candidate since civil rule was reinstalled in 1983, and avoided the need for a runoff election." "In 1995, Fernández was elected to represent Santa Cruz in the Senate. She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1997, and in 2001, returned to the Senate." And I must say in Argentina there is a two-term limit, but it was his husband's first term when she got elected. Last year the congress passed a bill changing the law ruling communications. The old law was there since the last dictatorship and among other things prohibited NGO to own a media, even a small radio station. Now the big media conglomerates are criticising every action the government takes because their well-protected monopolies are going to disappear (they'll have to un-invest in all the companies they absorved just to avoid different editorial lines). Grupo Clarin (Clarin Group) is the biggest of these conglomerates and states this is an attack to them, but the reality is that they were operating an ISP illegaly without a license and the measure taken by the government was executed according to law.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a similar thing in Afganistan - the US set things up to favor women running for office, as a means to correct the extreme gender inequality of the country. It didn't take long for an exploit to be found: Women officially run, but on the openly known grounds that they are to defer to their husband in all matters and have their name on the ballot only for legal reasons.

Re:So what?

[tannnk]

They have bought media companies all around the country. They bought tv stations in every major city and shut down local programming. They produce everything in Buenos Aires and it's seen in the whole country. It won't boe a problem if there were local alternatives, but since Clarin bought them... The same goes with newspapers and radio station. Now, they owned a cable company named Multicanal. The only competence was Cablevision, but they have divided coverage areas so they don't overlap, so there was no real competence. They provided cablemodem service over Multicanal, but it was really shitty and nobody used it. What they did is buy stakes from foreign holders of Cablevision so they could control both cable companies, and now they have done a customer reacomodation, meaning that you had multicanal and now you have cablevision and multicanal has no customers. Fibertel (The ISP) was a company owned by the same owners of Cablevision. Fibertel was licensed to provide cablemodem, but Cablevision was denied, so the trick was Fibertel owning the cable wires and providing internet access, and Cablevision "renting" fibertel's network and providing cable signal. If you had the two services, you had to pay two bills separately. On Jan 15 Grupo Clarin made Cablevision absorb Fibertel, dissolving Fibertel's legal personality, but intended to use the license granted to Fibertel. In Argentine law, in a regulated communications market, these licences are not transferibles, so that was not approved by the government and were told to stop subscribing new customers. They didn't stop, and tryed to keep operating illegaly.

Re:News For Nerds

[mangu]

Argentina is in America or is one of the Americas.

Actually, South America is the original America.

When Amerigo Vespucci explored the coast of Brazil in the early 1500s the data he brought back to Europe was used by a cartographer [wikipedia.org] to draw a map where the land was named America in his honor. The naming of North America came later.

In conclusion, and at the risk of being moderated "flamebait", I must say that to me a citizen of North America calling himself an American is more or less like a citizen of West Virginia calling himself a Virginian. Not quite correct historically, but OK, so what.

Re:So what?

[santix]

Yes, we call them 1st Lady. There are term limits: 4 years and 2 consecutive administrations. But this goverment (wife and husband) is not known for its transparency. They are agressive, rely on patronage and are constantly lying and distorting the reality of the country (statistics are compromised, there is a huge insecurity problem which is labeled as a "sensation"). I always find it hard to explain to people from other countries what the reality of this country is since it is so corrupted at every single level, that they can't often believe it.