In high-tech circles, cable bosses are seen as small-town people with a small-town mentality, running local monopolies badly and steeped in old-fashioned analogue technology.

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The NCTA has already starting posturing on its blog, Cable Tech Talk, with a post highlighting all the wonderful changes in the video distribution industry in the past 20 years -- however, curiously, the upwardly creeping price of the average bill wasn't mentioned.

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Mr Cable studied attitudes at Californian tech firms.

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But they do have their own style: featureless, virtually deserted buildings, full of marching rows of high-tech servers and routers fed by thick bundles of cable, their cooling fans forming a roaring chorus in the chilly gloom.

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Added to cable and satellite operators, such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, Netflix has now taken up the likes of tech's big dogs, Apple and Google.

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Under the banner "Save the Internet, " a noisy coalition of mainly Democratic groups and tech firms like eBay and Microsoft is pressing for language that would require cable and telephone companies to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing on their networks.

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Disruption, that buzzword that gets tech geeks and venture capitalists excited, has all its usual negative connotations for the cable industry.

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