Cox blocking content from AMC Theatres
A few weeks ago I noticed that the AMC Theatres website was not functioning correctly. Specifically, a lot of the content on the site just does not appear. For example, there is a section on the ma...
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Same exact problem here. Has been happening to me for a while now (months? hard to say) but I assumed the problem was with AMC. I like to think of Cox as one of the "good guy" ISPs compared to the other giants, but this theory makes a lot of sense. Perhaps an FCC or consumer advocate inquiry would help speed up Cox's research into the matter...
Whoever/whatever is the culprit, I think it could be argued that a lot of potential ticket sales have been lost from this. I know I personally have given up on going to see a movie multiple times after running into this issue and losing interest.
Confirming:
- Up-to-date AMC mobile app for Android will not load content.
- AMCTheaters.com website has the same behavior on both mobile and desktop browsers. Website and navigation work, but no movie content (i.e. showtimes, currently showing films, etc.) will load.
- Using modern, mainstream, unmodified networking hardware to access mid-tier Cox residential internet via coax. No VPN, proxy, or DNS changes configured.
- App and website work fine over mobile carrier data plan.
- My Cox IP is 98 block and not on any blacklists.
I checked my IP against multiple public blacklists and it wasn't listed on any, so I sincerely doubt that's part of the problem. If they were using reputation-based filtering it would be extremely strange for it to work this way (to silently filter out only specific content).
I just asked another friend to check from his house (also on Cox copper) and he had no issues with the site using both mobile and desktop browsers. His IP is in the 70 block, though.
Anyway, I don't care enough to spend more time diagnosing or fixing the issue, whatever it is. I'm just concerned that it might be happening to thousands of other people right now and impacting AMC's ticket sales.
