Sometimes when two giant corporate entities clash, trying to choose a side is like being asked, "Who were you rooting for during World War II? Hitler or Mussolini?"

That thought ran through my head last week when I heard channel 10/WBIR, the NBC affiliate in Knoxville, and the Dish satellite company were coming to a loggers head over broadcast fees in this area.

To be completely accurate, it was WBIR's parent company, Gannett, that was waging the price war with Dish.

The way it works, so I understand, is that when satellite companies, or cable companies, transmit channels, even so called free ones like WBIR, they pay a percentage per customer. It doesn't amount to much, usually a few cents per subscriber. But when you're talking millions of subscribers, the money can add up.

Usually this stuff happens without the consumer ever knowing about it. But occasionally the two sides are so far apart on money that it seeps out. It happened with Dish and the Fox Network a couple of years ago, but like this one, it was worked out before the deadline hit.

The problem I had with this is I'm not really a fan of either entity. I consider WBIR to be extremely arrogant for a middling product (there's a stumbling, tongue tied news anchor there that just irks me) and Dish, well, Dish is like any other corporate behemoth.

For complete disclosure, I am a Dish customer and have been since Feb. 2005. They've been a pretty decent company to deal with, only raising prices twice in that nearly eight year period for a total of $9. For the package we have, anyway. But we haven't received anything extra for that $9 more a month, which is why I can't give them a high rating.

But their prices have increased at a much lower rate than DirecTV, their only satellite competition, and much, much slower than the cable companies. They have some kind of value guarantee, stating they will get the best price possible for their customers.

That was where the problem started. Gannett, I assume, was wanting to raise their re-broadcast fees and Dish balked at what they were asking. Dish can be hard headed about this. They recently lost several channels, including AMC (Walking Dead, Mad Men) because they wouldn't raise the rates as much as the network honchos wanted.

I never had any doubt they would work it out. Even when WBIR showed their arrogance by stating Dish customers could switch to DirecTV or any number of cable companies if you simply couldn't live without wildly incorrect weather forecasts and news anchors who constantly trip over their words.

WBIR knew most people wouldn't go to the hassle of switching companies for one channel, especially when they could watch most (all) of the shows on the Internet. And Dish, now a long time veteran of this nonsense, probably knew what they could get and just wanted to put on a good show for their customers before signing on the dotted line.

But it's not just TV corporations that are trying to get the last penny out of your bank account. I read in a recent USA Today that broadband Internet companies (pretty much all of them now) are wanting to put a limit on how many gigabytes of data you can use on your connection. Kind of like what you have on smart phones.

They'd set the cap, so the story said, at 26 gigabytes a month. If all you do is surf the Internet for a few minutes a day and check your email, you'll be fine. But if you watch a lot of videos or play games or use a streaming service like Netflix, you'll be out data by, oh, the second week of the month.

It's the cable companies mainly wanting to do this (imagine that), but apparently ATT tried to roll it out for a test drive in couple of areas and ticked off consumers so badly that they backed off.

These companies are looking a new revenue source as people are dropping landline phones like crazy. As somebody said in the story, broadband is not finite. It's not disappearing like oil. This is a money grab, nothing more.

For me, it'd be like if somebody managed to start charging for air. Plenty of it to go around, but you only get 15 days for the price you're paying. After that, you'd better buy the air or you're going to be hurting.

Don't laugh. People once laughed at the idea of bottled water.

michael.thomason@advocateanddemocrat.com | 442-4575