Court Rejects Cap on Cable Market Share

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So the courts have once again rejected a cap that would limit the market share any one cable provider can have to 30%. I want to know where you guys are at on this issue. Hit the comments link below and let us know what you think.

Fearing a cable monopoly, Congress in 1992 directed the FCC to set limits on how many customers cable TV operators could reach nationwide. The FCC set the 30 percent limit, but that was thrown out twice by the courts. Two years ago, under then-FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the same cap was reinstated, prompting the new challenge from Comcast.
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well its not a free market if you cant have more then 30% of it is it?
 
This is just like price caps on electricity, etc. They should be in place, because random rate hikes suck (when there is no competition, they're free to do whatever they please).

Cable companies are after the almighty dollar, not looking out for the best interests of the customer. Someday, this might bite some in the butt. However, if they have huge market share, they're not going to care one way or the other.
 
See this is one of those things that even though we all want to support the free market, regulation sometimes need to step in to prevent monopolies and price fixing. No matter what side of the aisle you're on its always a difficult choice to make.

With regards to the cable providers in particular, I'm all for heavy regulation. I normally wouldn't be but they have brought this on themselves with their anti-consumer business practices. What they do is a hair shy of and almost outright corruption in my state.
 
Anything that would limit Comcrap gets a thumbs up from me.
 
I'm against the cap, because it's not going to do anything whatsoever.
 
Another victory for socialism for the rich (aka naked greed capitalism),
 
Terminus said:
See this is one of those things that even though we all want to support the free market, regulation sometimes need to step in to prevent monopolies and price fixing. No matter what side of the aisle you're on its always a difficult choice to make.

With regards to the cable providers in particular, I'm all for heavy regulation. I normally wouldn't be but they have brought this on themselves with their anti-consumer business practices. What they do is a hair shy of and almost outright corruption in my state.
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QFT. The way I see it, if we could trust companies to put their customers first instead of their bottom line, we wouldn't need caps/regulations in the first place, and they wouldn't need to worry about their bottom line, unless they really, really sucked as far as providing goods/services that people want.

I'd have no problem with paying top dollar if the product/service I'm getting is top shelf. But if I find out a competitor has something of equal quality or better at a lower price, I'm going to go with the better deal. This concept is something I think that people follow for the most part unless they have some sense of brand loyalty or obligation to remain where they are at. (i.e. contracts, they work for the company, etc.)
 
I'm generally against more regulation, but they cable and internet providers need some serious regulation due to defacto monopoly or at best in must places dupoloy status. At my apartment, I have the choice between Comcast and OTA for TV. I have zero other options since I don't have a place for a dish and Verizon will not run FIOS through the building. Comcast knows this so they seriously screw us on fees, fees, and more fees.

I'm paying $80 more a month then I was for satellite in a previous location with less receivers and fewer channels.

If there was any actual competition, I'd be all for the letting the consumers decide. In order for the market to work, there needs to be choices though.
 
i dont have a problem with the cap in actual practice (in principle i disagree with caps) because utility providers are routinely capped/regulated for the betterment, or at least fairness, of the consumer. cable counts as a utility.. and lets face it, comcast and time warner kind of suck left to their own devices :(
 
There are very few things in this world that make sense to be monopolized. Cable providers are not amongst them.
 
How would setting a national cap even remotely fix the problem? All the cable operators would have to do is have a golf match someday and decide what territories each one would get so that none of them go over the national cap but each one would have a monopoly in each territory. That way the feds couldn't go after them and they'd be free to screw the crap outta everyone still. Utility monopolies don't exist on a national scale. This problem is LOCAL and LOCAL only. The feds should STFU and let the states take care of their own. Oh but that would require the states actually having power and since they've given it all away over the past 100 years that isn't going to happen.
 
Don't cap and we will eventually have a monopoly that will eventually get broken up Baby Bell style. More of the same with a different name. We suffer then get real competition for a while, until the baby comcasts start swallowing each other, and we repeat the cycle.

Cap and we will just get conglomerate owned spin offs that appear to be independent from the parent corp, while in reality would still be controlled by the same 10-20 people. Worst case imho, there is little way anything can improve under that model. We will end up with what amounts to a big 3 with natural business and geographical barriers to competing with one another.

Regulate heavily, and the isps become basically identical to one another in service, pricing, and speed. The reasons to expand and upgrade infrastructure past the barest minimum dies. The isps will have a playing field that the feds would "even" out for the other isps every time one of them tried to innovate or expand. It would mean slow steady growth and then a war of slow attrition until enough die off for the government to take control and have most of us welcome it.

Good points and bad for all of them. Mostly bad it seems. Follow the path of least suffering.
 
So much absurdness in this thread.

Cable companies almost always already have a cable monopoly in their markets. The only way to stop that is to allow some companies to grow above 30%. You want to guarantee higher rates then cap it.

And unless the cable companies find a magical way to shut down DirecTV and Dish Network there is plenty of competition that and with telephone companies coming in it is a non-issue.
 
A cap might prevent a company from getting too big, bit it also removes the drive for that same company to lower prices to gain market share.
 
Todd_a said:
A cap might prevent a company from getting too big, bit it also removes the drive for that same company to lower prices to gain market share.
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]Of course all a cap does is assure cable companies can snuggle up in to their little fiefdom monopolies and not have to compete with other cable companies.

That is one reason the cap was in the bill to begin with, it had nothing to do with protecting consumers but protecting cable companies.
 
they need to show a marked improvement in existing capabilities before they go trying to expand their sometimes flawed service to more people....once they get what they have TODAY running optimally, and can deliver the max bandwidth to everyone on their network for at least some period of time, then i think theres no reason to let them grow any further, of course, if they wont let cable companies grow they cant let the competition just stroll in to get the same customers either.....
 
Sherk said:
This is just like price caps on electricity, etc. They should be in place, because random rate hikes suck (when there is no competition, they're free to do whatever they please).

Cable companies are after the almighty dollar, not looking out for the best interests of the customer. Someday, this might bite some in the butt. However, if they have huge market share, they're not going to care one way or the other.
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Look, the problem is with regional infrastructures. Cable operators do not operate in some open source way. They operate in a regional vacuum, just like electricity providers. In essence they are a regional monopoly. I'd love to have FIOS come to my area, but is Verizon going to do it? Are they going to do it by spending billions to get permits and dig up streets or buying/leasing already in place infrastructure? Not to mention PUC involvement outside of the FCC it would make it very very difficult for cable companies to compete fairly across all regions. I live in a Cox area and right now, there are 3 main players. Cox, Time-Warner, and AT&T. Cox covers the largest portion of San Diego, with Time-Warner covering a lot of the northern portion of the county while AT&T already has their infrastructure in place from good old Ma Bell and installing anything new as needed.

Now those are 3 players, but I can't ask Time Warner to come to my area because it is controlled by Cox. I can ask AT&T to do it, but I would have to change my life in ways I don't want to to make that happen. Anytime you have physical services infrastructure, you will have regional monopolies. Either you live with them or you don't. If you start imposing price caps or subscriber caps, you hamstring their ability to do business. The otherside of the coin is that they are already a regulated monopoly so it makes sense to cap them. I'm not sure where I stand on this yet though. I can tell you though that I simply do not favor caps because of the repression it brings with it.
 
GORANKAR said:
Don't cap and we will eventually have a monopoly that will eventually get broken up Baby Bell style.
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We already had Ma Bell broken up into 9 distinct companies for all of the regions in the US. Look at the landscape now. There are only 3 major players left, sometime soon it may be 2, and it will be back to the same thing only to have them busted again and it will be worse this time than last time.
 
There's only one cable company in the crummy town I live in, and they have some shady deal with the powers that be to keep it that way for quite a while.
 
Bottom line, will this give us more choice? Do we give up our principles to hinder free markets?
 
Methadras said:
We already had Ma Bell broken up into 9 distinct companies for all of the regions in the US. Look at the landscape now. There are only 3 major players left, sometime soon it may be 2, and it will be back to the same thing only to have them busted again and it will be worse this time than last time.
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Which is why I said the cycle would repeat. It's not a good situation. If we had caught and stopped, or just outlawed the city, and county sanctioned and enforced monopolies, err, eh, exclusivity deals, when it came to telcos and cable operators years ago, it would be significantly less messy now. We don't have a time machine, so now we are left with a few less than optimal options being decided on by poorly informed and easily purchased politicians.
 
In order for capitalism to work as a useful system for society, it is imperative that fair and equal competition be ensured. I'm not sure a cap is the correct way to go, but preventing someone from getting a monopoly would be very important. There are some infrastructural things for which the only economically viable way is to have a monopoly, those should then be state owned and operated, so perhaps cable should belong to that category.
 
I think they should just make it so that any provider has to be given access & let the consumers decide what % of the market each gets with their hard earned dollar. Seems like a fixed cap almost guarantees a limit on how many providers will have access (max 4... 30%x3 =90% leaving 10% for the 4th).

What I propose means that if your service sucks you'll end up with a lower %, thus making companies reevaluate how they do business & make them compete for overall customer satisfaction vs yeah, we suck, so what? where you gonna go? Hopefully it would increase customer service, TV programming, VoIP service and Internetbandwidth, as well as any services that are provided and/or included.

The one drawback I see could be that they all say, "yeah, we all suck equally, so what? where you gonna go?"
 
Simple solution...pass a law saying if you accrue more than 30% market share, you are now a regulated monopoly, like the phone company or electric company.

That avoids the court's ban on setting a % market share, but does fix there widget if they go over the invisble line.
 
There are benefits and drawbacks to this. First, it's nice because it will keep people like Comcast from just destroying entire towns and killing them on price. On the other hand it prevents legitimately great deals/companies from making the headway they deserve. It prevents novel solutions, prices, technologies from blowing up.
 
They should look at the conflict of interest when a cable/satellite company also owns the TV stations, and sometimes even the sports teams which they show.
 
Free markets require regulation. The regulation should always focus on removing hindrances on the creation of competition, but even things like caps can strengthen free markets. Of course, if the 70% not open to company X isn't getting filled by someone else, the 30% cap makes no sense. There's another problem there that has nothing to do with 1 company having an unfair advantage.

So I'm all for a cap that keeps 1 company from bullying competition away from a market. In the case of "cable" competition, I really don't think a cap makes much sense.

I'm of the mind that network infrastructure shouldn't be owned by service providers. All service providers should have to lease bandwidth from the network to provide their services. Until such a situation exists, there will always be monopolistic issues. Requiring every service provider to lay their own network (whether it be wireless, wired or otherwise) just doesn't work. There isn't enough money in any market to support the laying down of enough "pipes" to create sufficient competition.
 
When a user can opt for two satellite providers, and in some places other land based providers (uverse, fios) caps make no sense.

If Comcast gets to 99%, bans non Comcast DVRs and charges $400/m after shooting down DirecTV and Echostar sats, then it'll be time to do something like this.

At present it's a solution to a problem that does not exist.
 
1.5Mb down 256Kb up is the new dial up. And for $80 a month at that with a sub 17gig a month cap and mp game destroying latency. Satellite is something you get as a last resort when there is nothing else left except dial up. It is good for websurfing, email, and the very occasional download and little else. Granted many would hardly notice the difference, but most of the regular visitors of [H] would.

http://www.dishnetwork.com/internet/internetComparison/default.aspx
 
GORANKAR said:
1.5Mb down 256Kb up is the new dial up. And for $80 a month at that with a sub 17gig a month cap and mp game destroying latency. Satellite is something you get as a last resort when there is nothing else left except dial up. It is good for websurfing, email, and the very occasional download and little else. Granted many would hardly notice the difference, but most of the regular visitors of [H] would.

http://www.dishnetwork.com/internet/internetComparison/default.aspx
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CONCUR! 100%

Comcast bought up the reasonably priced cable company at my last apartment and raised the price then imposed regulations... We need more options.
 
I dont know what its like nationally, but here it North Texas, cable companies have 100% market share. No cable companies compete against each other. We have Time Warner, Road Runner, and Charter all in the Metroplex and you have zero choice if you want to have cable.

Luckily FIOS is starting to penetrate....but not soon enough for me.
 
Caps in the cable world are silly, especially if done to provide consumers with choice. As already noted, consumers have only 1 choice of cable provider. The self-defeating part is that by capping them, you force them to have higher operating costs by preventing them from gaining economies of scale.

If you want competition and choice, and lower prices, then you should want one giant cable company that can be competitive against fiber and satellite.

Someone explain to me why monopolies are bad again? I can't remember the argument... something about price gouging or whatever? If so, shouldn't our DoJ invoke antitrust laws *after* a company has a monopoly *and* is abusing their position? Why do it before?
 
I'm for the caps. When any company has over 30% control of a media outlet we're entering dangerous territory. It's become clear these providers will stop at nothing to obliderate free and open press and content if it means better advertising and limiting their competitors' influence. The caps will never happen unfortunately since our representatives are already in the pocket of these companies -- I suspect this bill is just a negotiating ploy to milk the cable companies for more state money.


From a monopolization perspective, however, my issue lies in the fact that cable companies can have complete and legal control of a region with no competition. Regional monopolies are a whole ball of bad and open the door to crummy service, government payoffs (which become par for the course) and stagnent infrastructure/technology. I'm just astounded that this sort of thing not only goes on, but is institutionalized.

I don't even want to get started on the horror that is Time Warner Cable in NYC. For many New Yorkers, it is the only option for cable/internet service.
 
Comcast ironically only exist because they are a monopoly. they have so much national coverage that they can afford to do bad business and no one can oppose them.
 
If you do a bit of research into the state of Canada's internet and it's providers, you will potentially see the damage that can be done if you don't have the FCC step in. Of course, our version of the FCC (CRTC) is more like a cesspool of ex-canadian telecom executives, so it's more of a charade that anything.
 
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