Come on, Tom Wheeler–make the right choice for consumers.
Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has written an opinion piece for Time Magazine saying the proposed merger of Time Warner and Comcast simply must be stopped:
Comcast and Time Warner Cable executives planned to visit the Department of Justice today to try to salvage their companies’ stalled merger. DOJ staff reportedly fear this tie-up would diminish competition. The Federal Communications Commission must also pass judgment on whether the deal serves the public interest. I believe the merger fails both the anti-trust and the public-interest metrics. Further, no set of conditions can ameliorate the harms that would result from allowing the nation’s largest cable company to swallow up its next-largest rival. At stake is more than just who controls the cable programming market; this is about who controls broadband, and how we connect and communicate in the 21st century.
His sentiments echo others who are adamantly opposed to the mega-merger.
From U.S. News in 2014:
Economists would politely describe Comcast’s power-grab as complete horizontal and vertical integration; I call it dangerous. If the Federal Communications Commission approves the merger, Comcast would have unparalleled dominance over both the hard and soft parts of cable TV: infrastructure and content. The new company would have outsized leverage when dealing with other content providers – in the spring, for example, House Republicans warned that the merger could "give the new company undue influence over the potential success of cable channels whose programming might compete with Comcast's," as the New York TImes reported. This merger could restrict the diversity of voices Americans see and hear and picks the pockets of middle-income Americans.
From the op-ed pages of the
Washington Post:
Time Warner and Comcast, of course, argue that their marriage would be unambiguously “pro-consumer” and would “generate significant cost savings and other efficiencies.” But they have also effectively acknowledged that those alleged efficiencies wouldn’t be passed on to consumers. During a conference call shortly after the merger announcement, a Comcast executive told reporters, “We’re certainly not promising that customer bills are going to go down or even increase less rapidly.”
This should be enough to concern the antitrust regulators at the Justice Department. But remember that the Federal Communications Commission, which must also approve the merger, has a broader mission beyond just trust-busting: Regulators there are supposed to judge whether mergers are “in the public interest” before waving one through (or at least imposing conditions on it). Traditionally “public interest” has included factors including competition, localism and diversity. Perhaps a solid record of screwing over millions of customers should be a consideration, too.
Indeed. If the FCC is really going to act in the best interest of consumers, this merger must be stopped in its tracks.