A bigger Comcast is not better for consumers.
In a vaguely worded application for approval, the two cable behemoths claim the mega merger would “generate substantial public interest benefits, with no countervailing harms.” But it is hard to see how the public will benefit. TURN has heard similar claims in defense of mega-mergers in the past, and ultimately they have always rung hollow.
TURN ally Public Citizen Public Citizen has pointed out that Comcast’s track record on following through on consumer commitments does not bode well. Public Knowledge VP Mike Weinberg recently told US News and World Report that Comcast “has not done a very good job” of upholding commitments it made to the FCC to get its 2011 mega-merger with NBC approved. At the same time, Comcast is taking advantage of its market share to push its own content ahead of competitors.
Comcast is already big enough to put the screws to Netflix, itself a market giant. Netflix accounts for close to a third of all traffic during "primetime" Internet hours – 9pm to 12am. But Comcast was able to slow the speeds at which Netflix content was delivered to customers.
Netflix was eventually forced to pay Comcast higher fees for access. So why should we expect different from a Comcast colossus? If the merger goes through, Comcast will provide Internet service to about 40% of the U.S. If it has the power to pick and chose which content gets fast access now, imagine what an even bigger Comcast could do- and probably would.
Comcast claims it won’t hold dominant market share, at least as far as phone service goes. Even if that were true statewide it would certainly not be true in all communities. AT&T, another wildly unpopular company, has announced its intention to swallow DIRECT TV whole.And for cable customers, whose hatred of both companies comes across loud and clear in every survey of customer satisfaction, the situation is even worse.
Big companies seeking growth on steroids always make the same arguments. They’ll have the power to innovate! And they’re not really monopolies, even if it looks that way!
But if we take a closer look, there’s usually a bottom line calculation behind their mega-growth. In this case, the stakes are especially high: if Comcast gets its way, it will be a huge step closer to, quite literally, world domination of the Internet. Comcast has already acknowledged that the colossus is an effort to cut off video and broadband competition from mere giants like Google and Yahoo. The more bandwidth Comcast controls, the more bandwidth it can exert control over.
At one time, our country had a commitment to preventing unregulated monopoly power in the telecommunications marketplace. We broke up the AT&T monopoly in 1984, hoping that after the company was split into smaller ones that would be more vulnerable to competition and more accountable to customers. Instead, AT&T has become the Humpty-Dumpty of the Internet age, putting itself back together bigger, more ubiquitous and far, far more profitable than ever before, expanding into cable, Internet, mobile phones and anything else it can get its hands on. Comcast’s power- and reach- is largely unfettered as well. As the Internet becomes an absolute necessity of modern life, these companies are positioning themselves to be its gatekeepers.
With phone, cable and broadband access increasingly tied to just a few corporations with almost no accountability, we need to modernize our rules to protect these essential services. If we don’t, the unregulated, insatiable companies that already control our cable and phone service will end up hijacking the Internet as well.