Why Cable TV Is Unjust

Around 2013 the Government of India made it mandatory to require a "set top box" to watch cable TV. I was too young when it happened so I didn't know the details. Recently I became curious, and after some searching, I have found some articles (1) (2) online of that time which talks about "digitization of cable TV".

The article reads:

Set top box or STB is a device used to convert encrypted signals directly in to digital signals. You cable wire carries these encrypted or digital signals.

It looks like Digital Restriction Mechanism (DRM) to me. For those who doesn't know DRM is, it's kind of software that intentionally prevents us from sharing media. You may remember previously the download button actually downloaded the media file. Then you could use external software like a file manager or video player to view that media file. You could also share that file with your friends and family. Nowadays, the download button downloads the file in an encrypted format. And, we can't access that encrypted media file from external software. We need to use the dis-service that downloaded it, to view it. We also can't share that with anyone else.

From the above quote it becomes clear that the signal going into the wire is encrypted, and we need specialised software, and keys, that's found in the set top box to decrypt it. This sounds just like DRM. The article further writes:

The most important restriction faced by current analogue signals is that government is not able to track the exact number of home users using cable TV but digitization is good to know about the exact in this case. The process of collection of revenue among all cable operators are 25%, 30% and 45% from local cable, multi-system operators and broadcasters respectively. So you can imagine that if number of subscribers is not exact then there is huge loss for the government, to avoid this disparity it is useful to have digitization.

I emphasised the part about government tracking. From the article it's clear that government knows exactly what each person (household) is subscribed to and watching. This is clearly a violation of privacy.

I remember before set-top-box came in we could share with our neighbours our cable subscription and they didn't need to pay to distributor to watch TV. There was no way for the government to know who is watching what. But after the digitisation now it is not possible and everyone needs to pay to watch TV. This is clearly wrong, because in a society we should be able to share what we like with others. Sharing is caring.

Finally, when the TV starts, the cable TV operator forces you to view particular channel for some seconds. Within that time you're not allowed to switch channels. This channel here is a right wing propaganda news channel, whose anchors spews religious bigotry.

Currently, our household doesn't have a TV, and I'd like to keep it that way.