Critics of Comcast’s Time Warner Cable Deal Are Feeling Hopeful

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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The Comcast-Time Warner merger has been put on hold for the time being in order for the FCC and other vested government agencies to do a closer examination of the acquisition. The re-examination of the terms of the agreements and possible down the road consequences are giving the opposition reason to smile, but just a bit.

Consumers rarely like cable or phone company mergers, mostly because they worry their bills will go up and the customer service will go down. The FCC has already gotten 81,000 comments, mostly from consumers.
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The fact that this merger is being considered at all is bad news for consumers imo, and sure sign that Comcast has bought and paid for a good chunk of both the FCC and our Senate (cough ORRIN HATCH cough). Unless the eventual plan is to nationalize the cable TV industry -- which isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, since the American public has already paid separately and entirely for 98% of the infrastructure Comcast and other providers use to deliver their products.

The only other eventuality in absence of Title II protections is either absolute or near-absolute destruction of the internet as a two-way communications utility, and conversion of it into just an alternate delivery method for Comcast's relentless race to the bottomless bottom, and their absurd imposition of 20th Century business models onto a 21st Century medium. We already have notice of this with Comcast's "fast lane" proposals, to first artificially create a "fast lane" and then to charge through the nose for access to it.
 
Personally, I think the very consideration of the merger is just pompous of them. It's also the very opposite of what America needs for internet to work. Until every inch of America is allowed to have as much competition as it wants, then no mergers.
 
If I were in the FCC, the only way I would approve this merger is if there was a 100%, iron-clad, completely unbreakable agreement that there would be absolutely no usage caps on any of Comcast's Internet users now and in the future.
 
And since we all know that the chances of that happening is slim and none, this merger should be shot dead.
 
Ashbringer said:
Personally, I think the very consideration of the merger is just pompous of them. It's also the very opposite of what America needs for internet to work. Until every inch of America is allowed to have as much competition as it wants, then no mergers.
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that will never happen

As I have pointed out time and time again. in probably over 90% of the areas there is no competition because nobody can afford to compete or cares to compete due to a long wait before getting little to no return on investment.

If you already owned an IP network and wanted to add tv over the top as a IP TV service, you would be looking at spending $700 - $1 million for a cheap way to go and having somebody else take care of the head end, or if you wanted to buy the head end then you are looking at a few million. Then all the content deals... So a good amount of money. And all of that just to break even or operate at a loss on the tv side. Not a good reason for anyone to want to get into that area if you can't make money off of TV service. So that isn't an area that you will see or expect to see competition as it isn't worth anyone new getting into that area.

Data side, Comcast and the rest are a perfect example of how competition is allowed and does happen. Things started with you having one choice for phone and as such internet. Then a law was passed that required competition be allowed and as such you got all the dial up ISPs, and then later fixed wireless (WISP), and cable tv providers offering voice and data.

The thing is these people already had a network in place and have had years to slowly upgrade it.

Lets look at an example that might make a little more sense. Lets say that you were alive in 1984 and opened a saving account. You put in $500 to start, and to make this faster to work out lets say you only earn interest at the very end of the year for the money you have in there and make 2% interest. Every day you put $1 into your account. $500 isn't that much to start with, and a $1 a day is a small amount to be able to put away. So nothing there is too crazy. at that point if you started on Jan 1st 1984, now 30 years later you would be at $16,319.34 as of the time I am writing this. If you were to just decide today to put that much into the bank that could be a little harder for you to do than it would have been to start with $500 30 years ago. This same hold true for all the current companies in these areas. They have been around 20 - 30 years, they have slowly been spending money buying new technology, putting new plant in the ground, expanding their areas.. they started out with one amount and then slowly got to where they are now. Expecting somebody to just show up with enough money to instantly be the size of these larger company isn't ever going to happen. When a company does try to get into this area, and they start off at a more realistic size for a small company without billions, people just blow them off because they can't do everything the bigger guys can, or have to charge more as they need to recover their money that they just spent. And so people don't want to go with them. Then all the while they complete that they don't have options.

Also doesn't help that when you ask most people which weighs more a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks they will tell you the ton of bricks weighs more as so they refuse to use a ton of feathers as a 1 ton counter weight because it isn't heavy enough.
 
You guys do understand that Comcast doesn't give one shit about the service portion of TWC. They/we are in it 100% for the content rights.
 
Ashbringer said:
Personally, I think the very consideration of the merger is just pompous of them. It's also the very opposite of what America needs for internet to work. Until every inch of America is allowed to have as much competition as it wants, then no mergers.
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There is no legal way to ban all mergers and people shouldn't want that level of government interference in business anyway ... people have valid concerns about this particular merger and it is fair for the government to give it a thorough review to see if those concerns can be addressed ... if they can then they should allow the merger (like they did with American/US Air and as they should have with Sprint and TMobile when they were considering a merger) and if they can't then they should disallow it (like they did with AT&T and TMobile)

Personally, if companies could afford to take the income hit (which most cannot), I would like to see more companies go private (like Dell) ... private companies are outside the reach of many government regulations, including those on Anti-trust, as those rules only apply to public companies and utilities ... there is already too much government interference in business as it is, we need to reduce that interference, not increase it
 
pigwalk said:
You guys do understand that Comcast doesn't give one shit about the service portion of TWC. They/we are in it 100% for the content rights.
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I am sure they do care about the additional customers ... as the largest internet provider Comcast was already able to leverage Netflix for the improved access to their customers through a special fee for access ... adding more customers gives them even more power to take on companies like Google and Facebook ... also, the cable side will leverage their streaming and OnDemand offerings to compete with services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu and the more customers in their pool the more competitive they can be ...

Scale is everything in modern business (not just from a monopoly perspective) as larger companies can offer attractive bulk or long term contracts that smaller companies are unable to offer ... this is why the phone companies were able to offer exclusive phones until the iPhone broke up the exclusivity bubble a little (although there remain plenty of exclusive phone offerings in the USA)
 
kbrickley said:
There is no legal way to ban all mergers and people shouldn't want that level of government interference in business anyway ... people have valid concerns about this particular merger and it is fair for the government to give it a thorough review to see if those concerns can be addressed ... if they can then they should allow the merger (like they did with American/US Air and as they should have with Sprint and TMobile when they were considering a merger) and if they can't then they should disallow it (like they did with AT&T and TMobile)

Personally, if companies could afford to take the income hit (which most cannot), I would like to see more companies go private (like Dell) ... private companies are outside the reach of many government regulations, including those on Anti-trust, as those rules only apply to public companies and utilities ... there is already too much government interference in business as it is, we need to reduce that interference, not increase it
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Because the companies are too damn big and they squash out competition. I'd like to see smaller companies, easier to manage, less need to regulate (see: TBTF banks). The other upsides are more competition, more innovation, more employment, less CEOs making a bajillion dollar to play golf while "talking to investors".
 
I own a bunch of Comcast stock so I'm hoping this will go through. And also, it's pretty obvious that it will go through since it's Comcast. Even if they can't straight up merge, they will find a way to combine assets through some technical lawyering maneuver
 
This is one of those deals that made my stomach hurt....i work in telecom and this merger is big bad news.
 
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