Yesterday, Cablevision started to promote via an email their TV to GO service which allows customers to watch TV outside their home – as long as they have the Cablevision Optimum Online user name and password.

A sampling of networks available to Cablevision's TV to GO service

The catch is there is no single uniform web interface – the TV to GO portal gives you access to a number of networks which require you to click and then authenticate. Authentication is done via a popup window created by your cable provider and once completed you are free to view content the partner/provider offers.

Once clicking on the Speed 2 network and clicking on the login screen you are presented with a number of cable and satellite partner choices

Some of the content providers are as follows: HBO GO, MAX GO, MSG Varsity, BTN, YES, CNN, TNT and TBS.

I tested this service out with the Speed 2 network on a PC and it worked flawlessly.

Although this is a step in the right direction the lack of uniformity of web video interfaces is a stumbling block as it is not simple to find the programming you want. Still, much of this content is available online ONLY through such a procedure meaning users will have to get used to it if they want legal access.

Moreover, where were the high and mighty journalists when Foxconn was making products for pretty much every other consumer electronics company of size?

Now it is onto how much Apple pays in taxes – there was what you might want to call a “hit piece” on Apple this weekend discussing how the company pays a small share of taxes and is able to use the fact that it sells virtual goods such as music to move revenue to jurisdictions which charge little to no taxes.

Here is an excerpt:

Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies.

None of this is news – companies routinely look to minimize taxes – some like GE for example have paid little to no taxes and have huge departments looking to pay as little as possible.

If we explore the reason companies are in business the primary reason has to be “to make a profit.” You might even say it is to make as much profit as possible – legally of course. Part of this mission in fact means looking to minimize payments for everything from raw materials to rent. Taxes are no different.

In fact if you do something to minimize profit you risk a shareholder lawsuit – and if you lose the shareholder lawsuit you put your company at risk and definitely have less money left over to pay taxes.

The point here is the New York Times seems to be on a mission to tarnish Apple.

And I might add I am no Apple fanboy – I was responsible for installing desktop publishing here at TMC in the eighties and intentionally avoided Apple because the company had no future in my opinion. The cost/performance curve of the PC market was much better and moreover I was able to save the company tremendous money by building the computers we used myself. And at the time, this was no easy task – fonts were an issue, Xerox Venturi Publisher stunk and the memory allocation of PCs at the time made life difficult – thankfully we had memory management products from Quarterdeck to ease the pain.

But now I am an Apple user – I also use PCs mind you but Apple is setting the tone in tech and is the company to follow.

But if you consider the New York Times to be the liberal newspaper of record and one of the liberal talking points is that large corporations are bad, don't pay their fair share, etc. then going after Apple repeatedly makes sense.

Again, I am not taking issue with the accuracy of reporting just that Apple is doing things which many other companies also do. It’s also worth  pointing out that even if Apple started to use complex tax-dodging strategies before others in Silicon Valley it is because of the age of of the company.

Point being, there is nothing to see here. Apple, like many other companies manufactures in China where working conditions are poor and moreover the company pays little in taxes and maximizes profits for its shareholders. You would think this is a good thing.

One final point worth making which was mentioned on CNBC early this morning by Joe Kernan is that the New York Times often makes conclusions in its articles and this particular piece seemed to be a great opportunity to push for lower corporate taxes in the US. After all, if capital flows to the jurisdiction with the lowest tax rates then what on earth does the US gain by having the highest tax rates in the world? The answer is nothing and as the liberal paper of record, the omission of the obvious conclusion was certainly not a surprise to many.

In fairness, the Times did have an article on GE's tax avoidance strategies. Here is an excerpt:

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

He further explained the challenge to the internet from governments like Saudi Arabia, China, Iran and even the US where internet access is either limited or threatened to be limited very soon via regulation which is the case with proposed legislation like Sopa and Pipa.

In January of 2008 I discussed the rise of the splinternet – or a splintering of the homogenous internet we once were accustomed to using. At the time I said:

In the good old days having a website was good enough... This was your portal to the world -- your customers and everyone else. But slowly but surely a wealth of new communities are being created and if you aren't part of them, you could risk losing tremendous market share. In other words, a single homogeneous Internet is no longer what marketers can count on.

Just yesterday in fact, Hasbro Inc. "woke up" to the fact that over 600,000 daily users utilize a Facebook application called Scrabulous which is a Scrabble clone. Scrabble -- the popular word-based board game is owned by Hasbro, the company which launched a lawsuit hoping to shut Scrabulous down.

In September of 2010 I surmised that HTML5 will slow the growth of the Splinternet and while I still believe this is the case, the growth of apps in app stores and governments looking to “clamp down” on open communications has only grown. Here is an excerpt from that piece:

In January of 2008 I used a term Splinternet to describe the growing number of areas content providers need to focus on when delivering their services. It seems according to Forrester Research I coined the term as it refers to a splintering of the traditional Internet. At the time I used Facebook as an example of this splintering but over the years, app stores too have also become a major splintered area as media companies and others as they look to optimize their presence in each disparate splinterverse.

More recently, Wired declared the Web dead which reinforces for me that as a society we are going in the wrong direction - one of exponentially more splintered communities. Of course Apple and Facebook have every reason in the world to continue to promote apps which are dependent on their platforms and/or approval process but is this good for users or bad?

My sense is as concerned as I am about the Splinternet becoming the Internet - and you can argue the transformation has already taken place, there is tremendous hope that HTML5 will force developers to first write apps for the web and worry about the app stores later.

The only thing we need now is an open HTML5 store which handles the billing for developers who want the widest audience possible as their creative work is monetized.

My optimism was shattered when I wrote a piece about Facebook becoming the internet back in March of 2011 in response to a newspaper moving all its content to the world’s most popular social networking service. Here is an excerpt:

But as Facebook has grown in power and influence, it is becoming a more important slice of the pie and as such developers are looking to it as a platform to start developing on first. Certainly Zynga - the company behind Facebook games such as FarmVille and CityVille being worth about $10B hasn't put a dent in this idea.

But it isn't just the developers moving to Facebook, one newspaper, Rockville Central has decided to move all of its content to the social networking site and it will cease putting fresh content on its own site entirely.

But Google doesn’t own the rights to content on Facebook, or iOS apps. Moreover, Google is perhaps the most powerful company on earth as it can instantly demote a website so it is no longer found when a relevant query is made. How do we feel concern or pity for a company which most human beings rely on daily?

So should we be concerned that the internet is spintering? Yes. Especially when it comes to foreign countries – but Apple, Facebook and other companies have no obligation to improve the quality of Google’s search engine.

In closing, I agree the world would be a better place if search engines had easy access to all information in the form of the internet not splinternet. However, it is really tough to feel sorry for one of the most powerful companies on the web – once which routinely puts sites who are potential competitors out of business through search engine changes which come with no warning or recourse to websites who are eliminated from results.