How a Comcast-Time Warner Merger Will Make Your Cable and Internet Worse and More Expensive

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/merger-works-will-make-you-seethe-when-youre-paying-your-cable-bill



In February, news broke that cable and Internet giants Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast would be merging, placing a new mega-company in charge of services rendered to their 30 million customers. And neither the Obama administration nor Congress don't seem to be raising many red flags. David Carr in the New York Times recently wondered aloud about Comcast’s $45 billion bid for TWC,“How can the largest cable company in the country bid to buy the second-largest and gain control over 19 of the country’s top 20 markets — corralling a 30 percent market share in cable and a 40 percent share in broadband — and there be no serious questions?"

In its public interest statement filed this month with the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast touts the many supposed benefits of the merger, even arguing that joining with TWC would be “pro-consumer, pro-competitive, and... generate substantial public interest benefits.” But a review of the facts shows exactly how wild this claim is.

One Monopoly To Serve Them All

In order to bolster its claim that a Comcast-TWC merger wouldn’t be anti-competitive, Comcast argues in its public interest statement that it has a much smaller footprint in the market than its competitors. It cites, for example, Microsoft announcing “that it will feature ads on the Xbox One, creating a new video advertising platform,” and the fact that “Amazon continues to leverage its unequaled sales platform and family of competitive tablets to promote its burgeoning Prime Instant Video business ... .In contrast to all of these companies, both Comcast and TWC have a more limited scale and scope.”

The problem with this argument is that Amazon and Microsoft, as vast as their empires are, don’t control people’s basic access to cable television and broadband (which is more or less a necessity for Internet users in 2014). The Xbox One offering Netflix doesn’t prevent users from accessing the service on dozens of other competing devices, but the same is not the case for access to basic information that TWC and Comcast’s cable networks provide. If the merger were to go through, tens of millions of Americans would be locked into less competitive cable and broadband markets, unable to vote with their feet and choose competitors who offer different services.

[Turbineguy]

1. Don't forget the biggest benefit of the merger.

Huge payoff to the CEO's

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Hopefully this will lead to more customers cutting the cord entirely.

And to Comcast pricing itself into a death spiral.