14 DAY TRIAL // Few people on this planet are happy with their cable provider. In some few lucky countries there is a real competition between ISPs and cable companies.
However, in many places, the different players have carved out their territory and maintain prices artificially high. There is no real choice, so you take what you get.
Unfortunately, this is legal, or has been deemed legal so far because, technically, there's no monopoly. The end results though are the same.
Of course, there's not much to do about it except put up with it, which is what the companies are relying on.
But at least some people are making fun of the entire situation, unfunny as it is. Extremely Decent Films put together a decent parody of a cable company ad, a satire of the situation. Satire, in most civilized parts of the world, is a protected form of free speech.
Not in Canada though. Strangely, the video, which is mainly targeted at the US market and doesn't actually name or hint at being about any one company (it's about all of them), has been blocked in the country by a "defamation" request.
Apparently, defamation is now a valid takedown request reason on YouTube. If the process is as automated and faulty as the copyright takedown process, you can be sure that this isn't the last time someone abuses it.
It should be absolutely obvious to anyone watching the clip that there's no defamation here, if only because no one company is being targeted. What's more, again, the video is mostly aimed at Americans, and there's even a map of the US, and not Canada, even though the quasi-monopoly is well and good north of the US as well.
Unless you're from Canada, you can check out the video here, *but be warned that discretion is advised, as it contains instances of language that might offend.